The sale of Airbus Defence and Space’s commercial satcoms services business is expected to be completed by mid-2015, according to Evert Dudok, head of communication, intelligence and security at the European aerospace giant.
Responding to questions…
The sale of Airbus Defence and Space’s commercial satcoms services business is expected to be completed by mid-2015, according to Evert Dudok, head of communication, intelligence and security at the European aerospace giant.
Responding to questions from SatelliteFinance at the Satellite 2015 conference in Washington DC, Dudok was confident they would get the deal done by the middle of the year and that both strategic and private equity players had expressed an interest.
Sources close to the deal have suggested that Airbus DS is leaning more to selling to a sponsor and that indicative bids have already been made.
Lazard is running the sales process.
Airbus DS put the unit up for sale in September last year along with a suite of other non-core assets as part of Airbus group’s wider restructuring strategy. Other subsidiaries and ventures on the block include Fairchild Controls, Rostock System-Technik, AvDef, ESG and Atlas Elektronik.
Total revenue of all the assets up for sale comes to around €2bn (US$2.6bn), or just over 14% of the €14bn in sales that the Airbus DS division makes overall.
The commercial satcoms business that Airbus is selling predominantly comprises satcoms service provider Vizada, which it bought from private equity firm Apax France for roughly US$960m in 2011.
