Aerospace giant Airbus Defence & Space CEO Guillaume Faury told analysts that he would prefer to merge all of its Space Division with rival satellite specialist Thales Alenia Space’s similar activity.
However, he added that if Europe’s anti-trust and political regulators found that difficult to approve, then Airbus would slice merger transactions into small pieces to make a combination more palatable.
“There are many ways of skinning the cat,” he told analysts. “Our space activity, when it comes to satellites, is a diverse one. We have telecoms, military satcoms, exploration, science, Earth observation. “Ideally we find solutions that could cover all the segments, but we could find solutions that are a bit subscale.”
Faury, speaking at the company’s 9-month results announcement, said that the space industry in Europe was undergoing major challenges and needed to transform itself.
Airbus’s Space division reported a 7.2 per cent fall in revenues when compared to a year previous to €1.445 billion.