Airbus CEO hints at MBDA-like venture for European space merger

By Gianluca Lo Nostro

(Reuters) - The CEO of Airbus said on Thursday he would be happy if space merger talks with Thales and Leonardo led to a venture like the MBDA European missile project and hopes EU antitrust regulators will take a looser stance than in the past.

"We are looking at different scenarios... In Europe, we have technologies, even better ones (than in the US), but we are missing the scale that we need to be competitive," Guillaume Faury said during an earnings call.

MBDA, owned by Airbus, Britain's BAE Systems and Italy's Leonardo, was created in 2001 with the goal of making it one of the top global missile makers after a decade of military budget cuts across Europe that spurred sector consolidation.

Now, European firms are scrambling to remain competitive on space activities as demand in the commercial satellite market is shifting more towards low Earth orbit (LEO) constellations like the one owned by Elon Musk's Starlink, rather than traditional geostationary satellites.

"We really hope that the antitrust authorities of Europe will look at it in a different way compared to the past... that comes with creating consolidations that could look like a bit monopolistic in Europe," Faury told journalists at a press conference in Toulouse.

However, the CEO said that European firms are viewed as "small players" when compared to the "giants" in the U.S. and in China.

Earlier on Thursday, the world's largest planemaker reported a new 300 million euro ($313.20 million) charge for its troubled Space business.

Airbus has piled up almost 2 billion euros of total writedowns in two years for its satellite projects, which industry sources have mainly linked to its loss-making OneSat programme of reprogrammable satellites.

Last Friday satellite operator Eutelsat, an Airbus client with the British and the French government among its top investors, reported more than half a billion euros in impairment on GEO satellites.

($1 = 0.9579 euros)

(Reporting by Gianluca Lo Nostro; Editing by Susan Fenton)