spacetoday.net: SES completes acquisition of Intelsat

Posted: Sun, Jul 20, 2025, 9:54 AM ET (1354 GMT)
With its acquisition of Intelsat complete, SES plans to scale up a constellation of medium Earth orbit (MEO) communications satellites. SES completed Thursday its acquisition of Intelsat, creating an operator with about 90 GEO satellites, a third more than three of its biggest rivals — Eutelsat, Telesat and Viasat — combined. In an interview, SES CEO Adel Al-Saleh said while he expects the GEO communications market to stabilize soon after years of decline, he sees a major growth opportunity in MEO, where SES already has nearly 30 O3b satellites. SES is preparing to shift from launching one next-generation constellation at a time to building a continuously expanding fleet, envisioning "hundreds" of MEO satellites. SES plans to spend close to $700 million annually on capital expenditures over the next three years, excluding commitments to Europe's IRIS² sovereign broadband constellation.