By Gianluca Lo Nostro<\/p>\n
PARIS, Feb 13 (Reuters) – Eutelsat on Friday reported better-than-expected revenue, bolstered by efforts from France to advance plans for a European competitor to \u200cElon Musk’s Starlink, which are boosting the satellite operator as it pivots to \u200cfocus on internet services.<\/p>\n
Revenue for the first half of its financial year reached 592 million euros ($702 million), surpassing analysts’ \u200baverage forecast of 581 million euros.<\/p>\n
Though it remained loss-making, the company reduced operating losses by 85%.<\/p>\n
Eutelsat also slashed net debt by more than half after the French state, now its top shareholder, led a 1.5 billion euro rescue last year to stabilise a balance sheet shaken by \u200ca declining video business and rising \u2060borrowing costs.<\/p>\n
FRANCE DRIVING PUSH TO TAKE ON STARLINK<\/p>\n
France sees Eutelsat as Europe’s only viable challenger to Starlink, given its ownership of OneWeb, the \u2060only other active satellite network in the low Earth orbit (LEO).<\/p>\n
Those satellites, folded into the group in the 2023 merger with London\u2011based OneWeb, are used by governments and militaries and have become strategic assets \u200bfor national \u200bsecurity.<\/p>\n
The bet is starting to show early signs \u200bof traction even as high costs \u200cpersist.<\/p>\n
Eutelsat said OneWeb’s revenue jumped almost 60% and made up about a fifth of group sales, partly offsetting a steady decline of legacy broadcasting.<\/p>\n
Still, it must replace ageing OneWeb satellites and has secured a state\u2011backed loan of 1 billion euros to buy 340 new Airbus spacecraft.<\/p>\n
The company is looking at projects to provide at some point satellite-to-smartphone internet services, also known \u200cas direct-to-device, CEO Jean-Francois Fallacher said in a post-earnings \u200bcall with reporters.<\/p>\n
Asked about a request from France’s foreign \u200bministry to explore sending terminals to \u200bIran after authorities imposed an internet blackout last month, Fallacher said Eutelsat \u200cwould support the Iranian people as much \u200bas it could.<\/p>\n
Eutelsat also \u200bcancelled a satellite order from Thales Alenia Space, saving more than 100 million euros in capital spending.<\/p>\n
The company said it would now proceed with refinancing its bonds, \u200bafter last year’s cash call \u200ctriggered upgrades from credit rating agencies.<\/p>\n
Shares of Eutelsat were up 6.6% by 0836 GMT, bringing \u200btheir gains to around 33% this year.<\/p>\n
($1 = 0.8427 euros)<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Gianluca Lo \u200bNostro; Editing by Matt Scuffham and Milla Nissi-Prussak)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Gianluca Lo Nostro PARIS, Feb 13 (Reuters) – Eutelsat on Friday reported better-than-expected revenue, bolstered by efforts…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":295837,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[59926,1814,61,60,21500,15229,1389,82,247,1390],"class_list":{"0":"post-295836","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-eutelsat","9":"tag-france","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-oneweb","13":"tag-revenue","14":"tag-satellite","15":"tag-science","16":"tag-space","17":"tag-starlink"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295836"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295836\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/295837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}