Amazon is in talks to buy US satellite telecoms group Globalstar, seeking to boost its bid to rival Elon Musk’s Starlink, the Financial Times has reported.<\/p>\n
Citing people familiar with the matter, the newspaper said the two companies were hammering out the more complex points of the acquisition deal.<\/p>\n
It comes after Musk’s SpaceX, which operates the Starlink satellite internet service, filed papers for what could be the largest-ever public stock offering.<\/p>\n
Starlink says it operates more than 10,000 satellites, offering connectivity to people on the ground.<\/p>\n
US tech and e-commerce giant Amazon, founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, is building a competing network called Amazon Leo, which has more than 200 satellites in orbit.<\/p>\n
Globalstar, whose market value is about $9 billion, has its own, smaller “low Earth orbit” satellite constellation.<\/p>\n
The newspaper said one factor complicating the lengthy talks was the fact that Apple holds a 20% stake in Globalstar, meaning that Amazon and Apple also had to negotiate a deal.<\/p>\n
AFP has contacted Amazon, Globalstar and Apple for comment.<\/p>\n
The Financial Times report said no deal had been struck and discussions could still collapse.<\/p>\n
Globalstar’s share price has soared nearly 230% over the past year.<\/p>\n
In October, Bloomberg reported that the company was exploring a potential sale with several potential buyers including SpaceX.<\/p>\n
Globalstar told the Financial Times it “does not comment on industry speculation or rumours,” while Amazon declined to respond.<\/p>\n
Yesterday, a source familiar with the matter confirmed SpaceX’s confidential IPO filing to AFP, which would reportedly put the rocket and satellite builder on track to list its shares by July.<\/p>\n
Media reports have said the SpaceX IPO could be valued at a whopping $75 billion or more. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Amazon is in talks to buy US satellite telecoms group Globalstar, seeking to boost its bid to rival…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":379353,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[61,60,82,247],"class_list":["post-379352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379352","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=379352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379352\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/379353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}