At Euronext Paris, OVHcloud has made a strong stock market debut. After the company’s IPO last Friday, the price for its shares (OVH.PA) went up quickly from €18.50 ($22.06) to even €22.00 ($26.23) today. The company aims to develop a European cloud alternative to the dominance of American cloud providers. OVHcloud raised more than €400 million and is now valued at around €3.5 billion ($4.1 billion).
Through this IPO, OVHcloud expects to accelerate its expansion, deliver better commercial services based on technological solutions tailored to new cloud usages, and consolidate its cloud leadership position in Europe while expanding into the Americas and Asia.
OVHcloud is said to have annual sales of around €663 million, while recording a net profit of €230 million. A very good profit margin for a company active in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) hosting business, we must say.
Octave Klaba’s Wealth
46-year-old Poland-born founder of OVHcloud, Octave Klaba, is now one of the richest tech entrepreneurs in Europe. He and his family still own around 78 percent of the company’s shares. Current IPO would now value their wealth roughly at €2.7 billion ($3.2 billion).
Klaba was 15 years old when he repatriated with his parents from Poland to Roubaix in France. Later-on he went to the engineering school in Lille, after which in he and three family members founded OVH. At first, they were focused on the hosting of dedicated servers, but in 2010 the business started shifting towards the delivery of cloud computing servers which ultimately led to the name change to OVHcloud in 2019.
OVHcloud’s Go-to-Market Strategy
Since its inception, OVHcloud has followed a vertically integrated strategy, allowing it to keep entire control over the value chain while offering “market-leading” performance, price certainty, full flexibility, and scalability. OVHcloud aspires to be a leader in sustainable cloud computing, with a proven track record of environmentally friendly technological innovation owing to its early strategy of developing and manufacturing its own servers.
As a cloud hosting provider, OVHcloud plans to develop new products to better suit the needs of enterprise and international clients, as well as continue to deliver solutions to address the growing need for hybrid cloud and multi-cloud settings. OVHcloud claims it is well positioned to fulfill the rising need for secure and sovereign cloud solutions from commercial and public organizations thanks to its open-source, reversible, and interoperable offering.
Since its start, OVHcloud has pushed a sustainable innovation approach, developing ecologically friendly technologies such as proprietary water-based server cooling, which was originally launched in 2003, and using circular economy principles with server reconditioning. OVHcloud is committed to becoming carbon neutral by 2025 and achieving net zero emissions by 2030.
