Airbus confirmed on Thursday Feb. 11 2024 that the OneSat family of commercial telecom satellites had been swept up in financial charges at its Space business.
In November 2023, Airbus announced 400 million euros of charges related to unidentified satellite program at the nine-month stage, mostly taken in the third quarter. Industry sources said at the time that these notably included the OneSat family.
On Thursday, Airbus added another 200 million of charges, bringing last year’s total to 600 million euros.
“OneSat is a program that is ongoing. We have recorded charges in 2023, big time, but we remain very committed to the program,” Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury told a news conference.
OneSat is a family of mid-market geostationary satellites that can be reconfigured in orbit with an eye on contracts from the telecoms sector, whose technological needs change rapidly in contrast to the increasing lifespans of modern satellites.
It was launched in 2019 with Inmarsat as a debut customer and Airbus has so far sold nine of the satellites, including one to an undisclosed customer.
But in the five years since it was launched, the commercial satellite market has been shaken up by new competition including the spread of low-Earth low-cost constellations.
In an interview on Thursday, Chief Financial Officer Thomas Toepfer stressed OneSat was one among several programs involved in a recently completed review of the Space portfolio.
“OneSat is one of the program that we have in our space business but the 600 million euros relates to several … program,” he said.
“We started the exercise in Q3 and then we turned some more stones in Q4 and during that exercise we found the additional 200 million, so very clearly it is not just one single program,” he said.
Of the 600 million euros in charges, 200 million are related to 2023 and the rest to previous or future years, he said.
Faury told staff last month that recent unexpected charges in its Space business were “not acceptable”, Reuters reported.
Sources: AirGuide Business airguide.info, bing.com, airbus.com, reuters.com
