PARIS – SES is targeting big milestones for 2026 and beyond as its portfolio grows to include manufacturing capabilities, sovereign space in Europe, and a direct-to-device partnership. CEO Adel Al-Saleh spoke Tuesday morning during World Space Business Week, sharing that the company’s manufacturing will be up and running by the beginning of 2028 when its factory is delivered. SES has labs up and running to build on-board processing units, Al-Saleh said.
“We have some big milestones in front of us. We won the largest European sovereign constellation ever, IRIS². We are now starting its delivery process,” he said. “Parallel to it is meoSphere, which we’re in the process of building. It has pathfinders flying today. The combination of the two represents 46 MEO satellites that will grow to 100.”
Speaking to Via Satellite, Al-Saleh explained that SES’ collaboration with K2 Space is an important partnership for the company, highlighting its expertise in satellite buses at scale.
“They allow us to execute a lot of our ambitions like hosted payloads and other opportunities beyond connectivity,” Al-Saleh told Via Satellite. “We’re flying the first pathfinder mission of that collaboration today, with pathfinder two coming up in 2027 with the next generation of on-board processing and optical terminals for testing. We’re doing another one in 2028 where we’ll test a close-to-production system before we enter high-volume production for the payload and the bus.”
The CEO told the conference he had no doubt that direct-to-device (D2D) is a fast-evolving market opportunity, much of which goes beyond the sizeable consumer market. SES is a strategic shareholder in D2D player Elveo, the company formed by the Lynk/Omnispace merger, which was completed earlier this year.
On Tuesday, SES and Elveo announced they are working together to establish Elveo satellite manufacturing and a supply chain in Europe.
Elveo brings technology, spectrum power, cost-structure, and speed to innovation, Al-Saleh said.
The chief executive also mentioned he feels SES is undervalued, though he acknowledged it was a CEO cliché to suggest so, pointing to the cash generative capacity of the company’s media business, while admitting it is experiencing a “structural decline.”
“At the same time, we have mobility and government businesses that are growing in double digits,” he said. “We just reached a point in our portfolio where the growth businesses are larger than the declining ones, which spells growth.”
Like many legacy companies sensitive to the maxim that they were the old guard, Al-Saleh looks to project the image of a resurgent giant ready to scale its operation.
“We’re operating in a fast-evolving industry,” he said. “Many companies are re-evaluating what they want to be. SES is a company in transition. We’ve been a traditional operator for ages and we have years of experience in it. The model of designing satellites, having someone else make them, then operating that model doesn’t work anymore. We are shifting from operator to a vertically-integrated space solutions company.”
Al-Saleh suggested that verticalization is the way a company controlled its destiny in today’s market, allowing to drive the way trade-offs worked, rather than allowing partners to figure them out for you.
“It’s a very different approach to development. In the past we would spec things, wait for three to four years with testing on the ground, nothing in space until we launched the final production,” he said. “This is a different approach.”
