Airbus CEO Hints Satellite Talks With Thales, Leonardo May Stretch Into 2026

PARIS—Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury signals talks among his company, Thales and Leonardo to combine satellite operations may drag into 2026.

Discussions of this nature typically take about two years to bring to conclusion, Faury said at the Paris Air Forum on the eve of the Paris Air Show.

The companies since last year have been in talks about how to deal with the collapse in the market for big geostationary satellites amid competition for low-Earth-orbit constellations, triggering earnings hits and workforce reductions at several companies. Faury had previously said he was interested in creating a setup modeled on missile-maker MBDA, where assets from Airbus, BAE Systems and Leonardo were put into one company, with each as a shareholder, to create a global player.

Faury, in a recent Aviation Week interview, said he wants discourse on a satellite restructuring agreement to move more quickly. “I think the commitment of the three parties is very strong. We share the common understanding that this joint venture will be much stronger than the sum of the parts,” he noted.

“The devil is in the details—in those activities, there are plenty of details,” he said.

The satellite issue has been only one of the problems for Airbus’s space business, however, which also suffered from the company signing up to challenging programs that experienced cost overruns. Airbus underwent a detailed review of programs last year to address the issues.

“We are stabilizing,” Alain Fauré, general manager for space in Airbus’s Defense & Space division, said at the forum.