Consultant: “European satellite mergers are failing”
February 7, 2025
Armand Musey, a well-regarded financial and valuation consultant at Summit Ridge Group, speaking on February 5th at the Smallsat Symposium held at Mountain View, California, was blunt in his view of recent mergers involving European satellite operators.
He delivered a pessimistic report, saying: “The big, large space companies are entering into a deep, dark desert of disruption and despair. It is not pretty. The consolidations were designed to better prepare them to fight SpaceX and Starlink, but now it’s clear to me that consolidation is not going to help them. This is a depressing place to be for these big companies.”
The “big, large” players he referenced were SES and its current purchase of Intelsat, and Eutelsat’s ‘merger’ with OneWeb. His comments seem to reflect the miserable view the market and investors are taking on SES and Eutelsat, both of which have European stock-market listings and where the pair are bumping along the very rock bottom in terms of valuations.
He also hinted at further highly necessary consolidation amongst Europe’s extremely large aerospace players. While Airbus and Thales-Alenia have been talking about bringing their space and satellite divisions much closer together, nothing has as yet happened. And while Arianespace continues to dominate Europe’s rocket launching focus there is also scope in this area, said Musey.
“Europe’s goverments have to decide what they want to do in both satellite and launch,” noted Musey. “In general space is strategically very important but [Europe] is so far behind when compared with SpaceX and Starlink that it is inevitable that there will be consolidation.”
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