Jean-François Fallacher, freshly installed as CEO after Eva Bernéke’s departure, beams from nearly every slide like he’s just inherited a business firing on all cylinders. In reality, he’s inherited a finely aged bottle of flat champagne. The margins are shrinking, the backlog is deflating, and the GEO video workhorse is trotting toward retirement. But sure, let’s lead with a headshot.
Eutelsat’s big headline, “all objectives met”, translates loosely to “we didn’t mess up more than we warned.” Revenues eked out a 1.6 percent like-for-like gain. That’s breathing through a straw. Strip out the LEO segment’s 84 percent rise and you’re looking at a business that’s flat at best, receding at worst. It’s the OneWeb bump and little else. They don’t break out how much of that LEO figure is recurring versus hardware or one-time bandwidth deals. That’s probably not an oversight.
Margins? Down from 59 percent to 54.4 percent. The press release paints it as “slightly below” last year, as though a 500-basis-point slide just happened in passing. Apparently EBITDA erosion is now a lifestyle choice. What’s also slipping, without much fuss, is the backlog. It dropped nearly 12 percent year over year, now down to € 3.5 billion. And while that’s still a sizable number, it quietly signals that older GEO contracts aren’t getting renewed in kind. The fine print doesn’t explain what will replace them, only that something might.
Video, the stalwart of Eutelsat’s history, shed 6.5 percent. No panic, just a mention that some Russian channels were pulled, costing € 16 million. Compliance is now the scapegoat for revenue shrinkage. We also get a couple of puff pieces: wedotv and SSR SRG renewals get parade treatment, despite being rounding errors in a segment that still makes up half the business. Nobody’s saying the word “terminal decline,” but the decline isn’t being terminated either.
Government Services jumped by 24.1 percent. Sounds heroic until you remember that war contracts are lucrative, temporary, and politically brittle. The € 1 billion French military framework agreement gets flashed like it’s already in the bank. It isn’t. It’s an IOU wrapped in a PowerPoint. The NEXUS program is still more talking point than revenue stream.
Mobile Connectivity? A resounding shrug. 0.3 percent growth in a year when everyone and their drone is talking about satellite-to-smartphone tech. The LEO deals with Station Satcom and the UK FCDO are trotted out like case studies, but these are still pilot programs, not scalable revenue engines. They dress up a stagnant segment in investor-friendly keywords and hope nobody asks what percentage of group revenues came from either.
In Fixed Connectivity, they’re banking hard on LEO. The +20.9 percent Q4 jump is waved around like a growth trajectory when it’s likely just delivery timing noise. Mention of KONNECT-VHTS pressures gets buried, naturally. Orange’s deal gets name-checked to imply momentum. The fact that it’s limited in scope and focused on enterprise backhaul gets less airtime.
As for costs, we get a mention of “selective investment discipline” and continued rollout of LEO infrastructure. Translation: the capex firehose is still running, and the hoped-for returns are on a timeline longer than most CEOs survive. Speaking of which, Fallacher just inherited this machine. So it makes sense his portrait is everywhere, better to associate his face with the narrative reboot than with the financial hangover left by the Bernéke era.
By the end, the release throws forward guidance with a straight face: margin ≥ 60 percent by FY 2028-29, revenue bumping up toward € 1.7 billion. No word on what gets cut, trimmed, offloaded, or spun to get there. Just numbers, like performance goals in a parallel universe.
This is what steady dilution looks like with a well-lit backdrop. A shrinking core, a pumped-up LEO segment still finding its footing, and a sovereign-badge-wearing defense pipeline too new to rate as reliable. Fallacher’s face might sell a new narrative, but the numbers are still telling the same old story.
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