Eutelsat Communications, the world’s third-biggest satellite operator by revenue, said it expected its acquisition of OneWeb will lift annual sales to 2 billion euros ($1.95 billion) by 2027.
The merger, disclosed in July and monitored by the French and British governments, aims to combine Eutelsat’s geostationary satellite fleet with OneWeb’s low-earth orbit constellation to offer fast internet services by satellite.
The leading companies currently fighting for a slice of the satellite internet market are Elon Musk-owned SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon.com’s Project Kuiper.
The French group expects annual sales of the merged entity to amount to about 1.2 billion euros in 2023, following the finalisation of the deal. It said it expected core operating profit to rise at an even faster pace than revenue.
Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) for the newly formed company should grow by more than 10 percent each year to reach approximately 1.4 billion euros in 2027, up from 700 million euros in 2023, Eutelsat said.
Eutelsat – which would own 100 percent of OneWeb as a result of the deal, which values its British peer at about $3.4 billion – aims to tap into the growth of real-time video gaming and rising demand for fast internet connections from companies, which increasingly rely on cloud computing services for their daily operations.
Eutelsat also plans to offset the gradual decline of its business distributing TV channels worldwide with the new revenue stream.
The group’s first-quarter sales fell by 4.5 percent on a like-for-like basis to 287 million euros, it said on Wednesday.
