SES: The SES satellite group falls on the stock market after the announcement of the departure of its boss

(BFM Bourse) – Steve Collar will leave the company at the end of June. The company will look for a successor.

Tough session for SES action. The title of the Luxembourg satellite operator listed on the Paris Stock Exchange collapses, losing 11.2% around 3:30 p.m., the largest fall in the SBF 120.

The group will lose its current managing director, Steve Collar, at a key moment. The company announced on Monday that the manager would leave his post at the end of the month to “pursue other professional and personal activities”.

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Reconciliation with Intelsat

The company said it was looking for a successor, with interim chief technology officer Ruy Pinto, who joined the company in 2017. Steve Collar took over as head of SES in April 2018, having previously led the constellation of O3b satellites, which became a subsidiary of the Luxembourg company.

This departure comes at a key moment for the company which recently – at the end of March – admitted that it was discussing with its American competitor Intelsat with a view to a potential merger. This then followed information from the Bloomberg press agency which mentioned a combined enterprise value of more than 10 billion dollars for the whole which would bring together the two satellite operators.

These discussions are taking place in a context of strong competition, with large-scale American constellation projects such as Starlink (which plans to launch up to 42,000 satellites by 2027) by Elon Musk or Amazon’s Kuiper project which foresees the deployment of more than 3,200 satellites.

Market consolidation

The ambitions of these new players have led to greater concentration in this traditionally fragmented sector. Thus the American ViaSat recently finalized the takeover of the British Inmarsat. For its part, Eutelsat launched a project last July to buy the British constellation OneWeb.

This while the sector is growing. According to Deutsche Bank estimates released in September, the space launch market alone could grow from $8 billion in 2022 to around $35 billion in 2030.

Last year, SES’s revenue grew 9% while its adjusted profit fell 41.5%. The group had also burned 322 million euros in cash, before financing transactions.

Julien Marion – ©2023 BFM Bourse