The European Commission<\/b> granted unconditional approval for SES<\/b>\u2019s acquisition of Intelsat<\/b>, issuing a determination that the combination does not raise competition concerns in the European Economic Area (EEA). <\/p>\n
The EC announced its decision this week after its market investigation that found \u201ccredible competitors\u201d in both media broadcast satellite services and \u2018two-way\u2019 services to aviation, maritime, and government markets. The EC said the combined entity will be constrained by fiber in the \u2018one way\u2019 satellite capacity market, by Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) operators for \u2018two-way\u2019 services. <\/p>\n
This speaks to the same reasons SES and Intelsat leaders have shared on why they believe the merger is necessary \u2014 to give the combined company the scale needed to better compete. <\/p>\n
The EC also determined that the combined company \u201cwould not have the ability to foreclose downstream competitors by restricting access to its satellite capacity.\u201d <\/p>\n
The acquisition also recently cleared the approval of the United Kingdom\u2019s Competition and Markets Authority<\/strong> (CMA). The CMA decision looked specifically at the market for in-flight connectivity services and determined that the combined company will face \u201csignificant competitive pressure\u201d in the IFC market. <\/p>\n This marks two major European approvals for the merger which will bring together two of the largest satellite operators amid increasing competition from SpaceX\u2019s Starlink constellation and pending competition from Amazon\u2019s Kuiper constellation. <\/p>\n SES CEO Adel Al-Saleh told investors at the end of April that the acquisition was on track to be completed during the second half of 2025. It must still be approved by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Department of Justice in the U.S. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The European Commission granted unconditional approval for SES\u2019s acquisition of Intelsat, issuing a determination that the combination does not raise competition concerns in the European Economic Area (EEA). The EC announced its decision this week after its market investigation that found \u201ccredible competitors\u201d in both media broadcast satellite services and \u2018two-way\u2019 services to aviation, maritime, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":46793,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48991"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48991\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}