PARIS (Reuters) – Teleperformance announced on Wednesday a plan to buy its competitor Majorel for three billion euros, and is targeting additional acquisitions to accelerate its digital transformation, its CEO Daniel Julien explained on Wednesday during a call with the analysts.

The French group announced earlier in the day that it wanted to acquire its Luxembourg-based competitor in the context of a transaction in shares and in cash, which will result in particular in the issue of new shares of the French specialist in call centers.

The stated objective is to increase the company’s global presence and promote its technological development.

“Technology has enabled our industry to progress, to meet new challenges and to develop new services,” said Daniel Julien.

This acquisition will make it possible to integrate the investments made by Marojel in digital services within the artificial intelligence (AI) offer developed internally by Teleperformance, indicated Daniel Julien, specifying that these solutions were much superior to those currently available and that they would be commercialized in the near future.

RBC called the Majorel acquisition a “second shock in less than 24 hours”, after Teleperformance said on Tuesday that 20-30% of its current production could be automated in the future.

For their part, analysts at Jefferies believe that the transaction “reignites the debate on the consolidation of the sector in the long term and how it will deal with disruptive trends in AI”.

Teleperformance is offering a price of 30 euros per share or 0.1382 share per share contributed for the entire capital of Majorel.

On the Paris Stock Exchange, Teleperformance lost more than 14% on Wednesday, closing at 175.30 euros, while in Amsterdam, Majorel jumped more than 38%, to 28.95 euros, thus approaching the price the offer.

The company said in a statement that Majorel’s majority shareholders, Bertelsmann and Saham, have agreed to tender their shares to the offer.

Bertelsmann and Saham, who each own nearly 40% of Majorel’s capital, have chosen the part of the stock offer and could obtain up to 4.6 million new shares of Teleperformance. They would thus hold up to 7.2% of the capital of the French group.

(Report by Alessandro Parodi, Victor Goury-Laffont and Piotr Lipinski, written by Matthieu Protard and Bertrand Boucey, edited by Blandine Hénault and Kate Entringer)

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