On paper, it’s poetic. A European juggernaut with its tidy Luxembourg pedigree marries a recovering American satellite firm that crawled out of Chapter 11 clutching a secondhand operations manual.
SES, groomed in a culture where everyone arrives ten minutes early with color-coded folders, is now hand-in-hand with Intelsat, which thinks “agile” means emailing a spreadsheet instead of faxing it. The merger announcement might as well have come with a translator. Not for language, just for workflow expectations.
The true magic happened when Betzdorf met McLean. One walks into the boardroom asking for strategy alignment. The other’s still trying to remember where the network drives live. What unites them? A mutual love of outdated internal systems, a shared belief that this will be “different,” and a roadmap scribbled in dry-erase optimism.
As for the promises? There’s a whole lexicon of merger mythology being wheeled out again, words like “seamless,” “synergistic,” “transformational.” They’re so common, they might as well be office wallpaper. But here’s the thing: SES and Intelsat inherited each other’s junk drawers. Two fleets, two sales teams, two IT back-ends duct-taped together and rebranded as a “unified architecture.” I’ve seen cleaner integrations in high school group projects.
And then there’s the LEO posturing. If you’re still wondering whether SES has real low-earth orbit assets, let me save you the suspense, they don’t. They have the MEO-flavored O3b mPOWER constellation, which is fancy, functional, and very much not LEO. But don’t tell that to the marketing team. They’re out here throwing the term “multi-orbit” around like it’s confetti, praying no one notices the rented infrastructure hiding behind the curtain.
Meanwhile, Intelsat, formerly cozy with OneWeb, now gets to awkwardly ask Eutelsat, its new competitor, for a LEO hookup. Picture it: your ex now owns the only car in town, and you need a ride.
Regulators didn’t blink. The FCC and EU waved this merger through faster than you can say “competitive redundancy,” mostly because they know better. This is a scavenger hunt. Starlink has eaten most of the LEO lunch already, Kuiper is nibbling at the sides, and fiber’s lurking in the basement cutting off demand before satellites even get a signal. This new SES-Intelsat mashup? They’re trying to catch the bus with a GPS from 2014.
And yet here we are. The day after. Inside the gleaming open-office cubes, two companies are now discovering that merging is about finding which of your systems breaks first. Engineers are busy realizing which cables don’t connect anymore. Salespeople are juggling duplicate client lists and wondering who owns what. Legal is hiding under a desk rewriting 120 contracts with conflicting terms and no clear service alignment. And the only thing truly unified? The Slack channel confusion.
So raise your glass.
Here’s to SES and Intelsat.
May your decks remain visionary.
May your dashboards eventually align.
May your orbit strategy stop pretending.
May the Force be with you!
And if you need help figuring out which CRM still has the working logins, I’m sure Eutelsat has a manual they can lend you, if you ask nicely.
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