WASHINGTON — Airbus announced it is taking an additional 300 million euros ($314 million) in charges on its space projects as it continues talks with two other European companies about combining their satellite businesses.
Airbus said Feb. 20 it took the 300-million-euro charge in the fourth quarter of 2024 as it completed reviews of a final, unnamed program in its space portfolio. The company had hinted in late October that it could take additional charges on that program as it completed a comprehensive review.
“We had to go through the program in detail, bottom up, to fully review what we had in our portfolio, and that we have done,” Thomas Toepfer, chief financial officer of Airbus, said in a call with analysts. He did not identify that program.
The company took 900 million euros in charges in June 2024, and the company said the total charges against earnings on its space business in 2024 was 1.3 billion euros. Toepfer said that the company does not anticipate additional charges as it’s completed the review of all its space programs.
“This exercise is now behind us,” he said. “We can now completely focus on what matters in the business, which is taking orders with a good risk profile, focusing on the execution and delivery.” He said later in the call that he did not expect Airbus to take additional charges on its space programs in 2025.
The company said last June that it had not properly evaluated technology risks on satellite programs when bidding on them, leading to the charges. It also blamed problems with suppliers that caused Airbus to revise make-or-buy decisions.
Airbus has been “more selective on our biddings and more prudent on the risk profile of our contracts,” Guillaume Faury, chief executive of Airbus, said in a press conference that followed the investor call.
Toepfer said Airbus was still in discussions with “social partners” on plans announced in October to cut up to 2,500 jobs from its Defence and Space unit by mid-2026. He projected the company will take 200 million euros in charges linked to those jobs reductions once those plans are finalized.
European space consolidation
Faury discussed at both the investor call and press conference ongoing discussions among Airbus, Leonardo and Thales Alenia Space about a combination of their space businesses. Those discussions, he emphasized, are “preliminary and nonbinding” at this time.
He argued that his company needed to join forces with Leonardo and Thales to compete with unidentified American companies. “What we expect is to gain scale and speed by consolidating the business,” he said on the investor call. “We are in a situation where some U.S. players are disrupting the ecosystem, are going at scale on new technologies on constellations.”
He said Europe has similar or even better technologies, “but we are missing the scale that we need to be competitive in this new environment, so we want to create this scale.”
Faury said Airbus would be happy if the discussions with Leonardo and Thales resulted in the creation of a company like MBDA, a European missile manufacturer formed in 2001 by the combination of missile units at three companies and jointly owned today by Airbus, BAE Systems and Leonardo. That would give Airbus “a significant share with others in a business that can prosper, that can grow, that can invest and can be successful on a global scale.”
Such a combination, he acknowledged at the press conference, could face European antitrust challenges. “We really hope that the antitrust authorities of Europe will look at it in a different way compared to the past,” he said, focusing more on global competition versus that within Europe.
“We’re really at a critical moment where we need to operate at scale, and that comes with creating consolidations that could look a bit monopolistic in Europe but, when you look at the world, it’s still small players compared to the giants we see in the U.S. and in China,” he said.
“Our view is that the market for space that we should be looking at as Europeans is the global market, and it is important that Europe is competitive not only within Europe but is competitive on a global scale,” Toepfer added at the press conference.
The discussions with Leonardo and Thales, Faury said, are focused on satellites and satellite services and do not include launch systems, contrary to some media reports. Airbus is a partner in the ArianeGroup joint venture that is the prime contractor for the Ariane 6, but neither Leonardo nor Thales have significant roles in launch.
“We don’t have yet a timeline” for concluding an agreement among the three companies, he said. “We’re still investigating different possibilities and making sure that the setup we would select is something that would work, that could go through antitrust and be successful on the market.”
