Three companies are left in the running to buy troubled French IoT company Sigfox, with an announcement of the winning bidder expected this week, probably on Thursday.

Sigfox went into receivership earlier this year and the French courts put the company up for rapid auction. Initially, nine potential candidates submitted bids, and that has now been whittled down to just three.

The three remaining bidders are French LoRaWan specialist Actility, French engineering company Oteis and Singapore-based IoT provider UnaBiz.

UnaBiz operates the Sigfox 0G network in Singapore and Taiwan. The company was asked to comment but its spokesperson Shuhui Fu said the company had been advised against issuing any official statement by the courts due to the sensitive nature of the receivership.

French firm Actility has until now specialised in the rival LoRaWan technology. Its marketing director Pavel Zaitsau confirmed that Actility was one of the bidders and that the result of the auction was expected before the end of this week.

Oteis is an independent French consulting and engineering group for buildings, water, environment and infrastructure. Camille Chesnais from the company confirmed the bid.

Antoine Mege, in charge of corporate communications for Sigfox, said: “I can confirm the three major bidders in the loop are UnaBiz, Oteis and Actility. We have no official statement yet as we are waiting for the final decision from the court that should be given this Thursday in the afternoon.”

The other six companies that submitted bids but are now no longer in the running are Buffet Investment Services Consortium, Greybull Capital, Heliot Europe, Iwire Innovation Management, Sentiens and Zekat. However, according to an email from Greybull’s Daniel Goldstein on Wednesday April 13, the company believed it was still in the hunt. Goldstein said: “We can confirm that we have submitted a bid to invest and support Sigfox. The court will soon decide the winning bidder from the various offers that have been lodged with the court. We have not issued a statement and do not have more to add at this stage.”

Sigfox was founded in 2010 and is headquartered in Labège, France, with offices in Boston, Dallas, Dubai, Madrid, Paris, Sao Paulo, Singapore and Tokyo.

The company was placed in receivership by the Toulouse commercial court earlier this year and initially given six months to put its finances in order. However, in February the courts decided to speed up the receivership process by inviting companies to bid.

Sigfox posted losses of over €90m for the last financial year and has seen steadily increasing losses over the past three years. Revenue has also been falling.

Through a combination of low cost and low energy technologies, with a global network owned and operated by 75 operators, Sigfox enables its customers to gain visibility and track their assets around the world. Sigfox covers a population of 1.4 billion people in 75 countries, and processes nearly 80 million messages per day generated by 20 million objects registered to its network.