Sema Group plc was an Anglo-French IT services company. It was listed on the

London Stock Exchange London Stock Exchange (LSE) is a stock exchange in the City of London, England, United Kingdom. , the total market value of all companies trading on LSE was £3.9 trillion. Its current premises are situated in Paternoster Square close to St Pa ...

and was a constituent of the

FTSE 100 Index The Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 Index, also called the FTSE 100 Index, FTSE 100, FTSE, or, informally, the "Footsie" , is a share index of the 100 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange with (in principle) the highest mar ...

. It was acquired by

Schlumberger Schlumberger Limited (), doing business as SLB, is an oilfield services company. Schlumberger has four principal executive offices located in Paris, Houston, London, and The Hague. Schlumberger is the world's largest offshore drilling comp ...

in 2001.

History

The Company was founded in 1988 by the merger of the British CAP Group and the French company, Sema-Metra SA. In 1991 Sema and

British Aerospace British Aerospace plc (BAe) was a British aircraft, munitions and defence-systems manufacturer. Its head office was at Warwick House in the Farnborough Aerospace Centre in Farnborough, Hampshire. Formed in 1977, in 1999 it purchased Marconi ...

established the BAeSEMA naval systems joint venture to produce naval systems: it was dissolved in November 1998 when BAe purchased Sema's 50% share for £77 million. By December 1991 Sema had acquired the Cambridge-based consultancy Baddeley Associates, from which it created Sema Group Consulting. In 1997, Sema acquired

British Rail British Railways (BR), which from 1965 traded as British Rail, was a state-owned company that operated most of the overground rail transport in Great Britain from 1948 to 1997. It was formed from the nationalisation of the Big Four (British ra ...

Business Systems for £27m which was sold off by the UK Government as part of the

Privatisation of British Rail The privatisation of British Rail was the process by which ownership and operation of the railways of Great Britain passed from government control into private hands. Begun in 1994, it had been completed by 1997. The deregulation of the industr ...

. In the same time frame, Sema also acquired Syntax in Italy, formerly the IT Services division of

Olivetti Olivetti S.p.A. is an Italian manufacturer of computers, tablets, smartphones, printers and other such business products as calculators and fax machines. Headquartered in Ivrea, in the Metropolitan City of Turin, the company has been pa ...

, adding another important market to its geography. In 2000, Sema acquired LHS for €5.1 billion to access its US telecoms software and services businesses: some analysts blamed the LHS acquisition for a profits warning in 2000 and a 45% fall in its stock market valuation. In 2001, Sema Group plc was acquired by

and was renamed SchlumbergerSema. In 2004 the bulk of the company was sold on to Atos Origin. The messaging unit was merged with Taral Networks and spun off as Airwide Solutions. The Smart Card and Terminal Department (formerly part of Schlumberger Test & Transactions) became Axalto, which later merged with Gemplus International to form

Gemalto Gemalto was an international digital security company providing software applications, secure personal devices such as smart cards and tokens, and managed services. It was formed in June 2006 by the merger of two companies, Axalto and Gemplu ...

Operations

Sema was registered in the United Kingdom but headquartered in Paris. Sema originally stood for Société d'Économétrie et de Mathématiques Appliquées.

References

{{Authority control Defunct companies of France Defunct companies of the United Kingdom Software companies established in 1988 Companies formerly listed on the London Stock Exchange 2001 mergers and acquisitions fr:Sema Group