SES cleared by the United Kingdom to buy Intelsat
The long-established Luxembour satellite company SES has now gotten regulatory approval from the United Kingdom to buy another long-established satellite company, Intelsat, with the purchase price €2.8 billion.
SES’s €2.8 billion acquisition of Intelsat was cleared by the UK’s competition regulator, in a move that will create a satellite giant to better compete with Elon Musk’s Starlink. The Competition and Markets Authority decided on the basis of “the information currently available to it,” to not subject the deal to an in-depth probe, it said in a statement on Friday.
The deal still needs to be approved by the European Union, which has set June 10th as the deadline for a decision.
This merger is because these older satellite companies are presently losing in competition with the many new low-orbit satellite constellations by new companies, led mostly by Starlink. By merging they hope to compete better.
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The long-established Luxembour satellite company SES has now gotten regulatory approval from the United Kingdom to buy another long-established satellite company, Intelsat, with the purchase price €2.8 billion.
SES’s €2.8 billion acquisition of Intelsat was cleared by the UK’s competition regulator, in a move that will create a satellite giant to better compete with Elon Musk’s Starlink. The Competition and Markets Authority decided on the basis of “the information currently available to it,” to not subject the deal to an in-depth probe, it said in a statement on Friday.
The deal still needs to be approved by the European Union, which has set June 10th as the deadline for a decision.
This merger is because these older satellite companies are presently losing in competition with the many new low-orbit satellite constellations by new companies, led mostly by Starlink. By merging they hope to compete better.
Readers!
My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.
As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!
For those readers who like my work here at Behind the Black and haven't contributed so far, please consider donating or subscribing. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
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Competing with Starlink will, I think, turn out to be a forlorn hope. GEO-based provision of Internet services has always been pretty niche-y and low-performance. Calling it “broadband” represents considerable gilding of the lily. What is really killing GEO comsats is not Starlink, per se, but the rise of streaming services that mostly use terrestrial broadband for distribution and also Starlink a bit around the edges – mainly in mobile applications, eg., planes, trains and ships. The old GEO model of carrying multiple cable or cable-like channels that have fixed schedules for their offerings is now viewed as less preferable than on-demand streaming by nearly everyone. These outfits need to find a new “killer app” for GEO comsats and I am not at all sure there is one to be found.
In the meantime, the GEO comsat outfits will diminish in both number and value through such acquisitions as the one reported on here. The paltry transaction price of 2.9 billion euros is the best possible illustration of the likely dead-end nature of most of the GEO comsat business.