(News Bulletin 247) – Due to the cyberattack that hit the group in June, the company postponed the publication of its half-year results to September 28. The group will also buy back up to 100,000 units of its own shares to cancel them.

Two months later, Virbac takes stock of the state of its systems after the cyberattack it suffered on June 19. The veterinary laboratory recalls that it had set up a crisis unit with experts dedicated to cybersecurity to assess the impacts and allow the continuation of its activity as much as possible.

“This attack caused a slowdown or a temporary interruption of some of our services: consequences which, however, remained contained thanks to the responsiveness and mobilization of our teams”, assured the company in a press release.

“Remediation continued during the summer and, to date, we have restarted critical and important applications while having further strengthened our IT infrastructures (IT editor’s note). This allows us to operate our priority processes at again normally on all of our sites around the world”, continued Virbac, who did not specify the financial impact of this cyberattack.

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A share buyback program of up to 27 million euros

The laboratory explains that these operations have now enabled it to find “fully functional financial systems”. However, all this still has a slight impact on the financial calendar of the group.

Initially scheduled for mid-September, the publication of Virbac’s first half results will finally take place about two weeks later, i.e. September 28.

Concomitantly with this announcement, Virbac also announced the launch of a share buyback program, on a maximum volume of 100,000 shares, i.e. less than 1.25% of its capital, specifies the company. The maximum price has been set at 270 euros per title, meaning that this program will not exceed 27 million euros. The purchased shares will also be canceled by the company.

To this end, a mandate will be entrusted to an investment services provider with a term that will expire in September 2024.

Following all of these announcements, the Virbac share gained some ground on the Paris Stock Exchange, rising 2.1% to 271.5 euros around 10:10 a.m.

A difficult passage on the stock market

It should be remembered that Virbac is currently experiencing a difficult period on the stock market, with its share price falling by nearly 12% over three months. At the beginning of July, the company had to revise its financial forecasts for the current financial year. The group then mentioned, in addition to the financial repercussions of the cyberattack, the slowdown in its growth, and temporary limitations in the production capacity of vaccines for dogs and cats, which weighed on the absorption of its fixed costs as well as on its sales.

On Monday, Stifel lowered its recommendation from “buy” to “hold”, worrying about the group’s business prospects, with in particular a comparison base for the third quarter more demanding than it seems at first glance. .

“The 2023 momentum (dynamics, editor’s note) is weighed down by structural market elements (in normalization and estimated at +3% by the CFO), one-off factors (vaccine production capacity and cyberattack) and visibility remains limited. both on the evolution of price elasticity which could extend the transition period and on Chile’s recovery (the recovery, editor’s note), “said Sarah Thirion, of TP ICAP Midcap, in a note published on Wednesday. .