Vendor lineage
Capgemini - and the Brazilian services business it absorbed
French IT services multinational; acquirer of the Brazilian firm TI Braxis.
Capgemini is a French IT services multinational, and it appears on this timeline through an acquisition: the Brazilian services company CPM Braxis was absorbed into it, which is how a substantial part of Brazil's applications and outsourcing capacity came to be owned from Paris.
The transaction is one instance of a pattern this timeline records repeatedly from different starting points. A services business is bought for its people and its contracts, both of which are local; the buyer is not, and the accounting, methodology and career ladder that follow are the buyer's.
The company Capgemini bought was CPM Braxis, which has its own entry here. TI Braxis was not a mistaken name for it but one of the companies that formed it: Braxis Tecnologia da Informacao acquired Unitech in November 2006 and took 33% of CPM in March 2007, and the merged firm carried both names.
Founding stories
Sogeti
Capgemini began in Grenoble in 1967 as Sogeti, the Société pour la Gestion de l'Entreprise et le Traitement de l'Information, founded by Serge Kampf the same year he left Groupe Bull. The name is worth reading literally, because it states the original business plainly: enterprise management and the processing of information, in that order. This was a firm selling the handling of a client's data as a service at a time when the computer doing the handling still belonged to somebody else, and the order of those two nouns is the whole services industry in miniature.
Grenoble and 1967 are consistently recorded. The founder count is not: the account of Kampf's own career states that he and three colleagues founded Sogeti, while the company is usually described as founded by Kampf alone. The three are not named in the sources read, so they are not named here.
The timeline
- Two acquisitions become the name
Sogeti acquired the Centre d'Analyse et de Programmation and Gemini Computer Systems, and took the composite name CAP Gemini Sogeti. A firm that names itself after what it bought is telling you how it intends to grow, and the next fifty years did not contradict it.
- Cap Gemini
The Sogeti element came off the corporate name, leaving Cap Gemini. The original 1967 name survived as a subsidiary brand rather than disappearing, which is the usual fate of a founding name inside a group that has outgrown it.
- Fifty-five percent of CPM Braxis, and an option on the rest
On 2 September 2010 Capgemini announced it was taking 55% of the Brazilian IT services firm CPM Braxis for BRL 517 million, about EUR 233 million, on an enterprise value put at BRL 970 million, about EUR 437 million. The money went in two directions at once: a BRL 287 million capital increase into the company and a BRL 230 million buyback of shares from existing holders. CPM Braxis was guiding to roughly BRL 1 billion of 2010 revenue with more than 5,500 people. Closing was announced in October.
Figures from Capgemini's own announcement and closing releases as carried by MarketScreener. The announcement expected closing in early October; the closing release was published on 13 October 2010 and states an October closing date, so the month is certain and the day is not restated here.
- The forty-five percent that stayed where it was
Majority is not ownership, and the structure said so. Capgemini held call options over the remaining 45% and the selling shareholders held matching puts, and neither side could act on them until the third anniversary of closing, with a five-year outer limit and a price set at fair market value whenever they were exercised. CPM Braxis was consolidated into Capgemini's accounts immediately, with the estimated value of that 45% sitting on the balance sheet as a liability. For at least three years the Brazilian business was fully consolidated and not fully owned, and the price of the rest was unknown by design.
The option terms and the balance-sheet treatment are from Capgemini's closing announcement. No source located records the options being exercised, so no event here says they were.
- CPM Braxis Capgemini, and the banks
By June 2012 the business was trading under the joined name CPM Braxis Capgemini, with more than 6,500 people and over 200 customers in Brazil, and it announced Caixa Econômica Federal as a preferred-supplier client alongside an existing relationship with Bradesco. Two of the country's largest banks in one sentence is the answer to why a French group paid for a Brazilian services firm rather than building one: the contracts were the asset, and contracts of that size are not started from nothing by a newcomer.
- Capgemini SE
The group became Capgemini SE, adopting the European company form. Fifty years after Grenoble, the surviving element of the name is the half that came from an acquisition.