French satellite group Eutelsat, often seen as Europe’s answer to Elon Musk’s Starlink, saw its share price plummet Wednesday following a report that Japanse investor SoftBank cut its stake in the company.
Shares in Eutelsat were last trading 7.8% lower as of 6:00 a.m. ET.
The moves come following a Reuters report that SoftBank has sold 36 million rights, corresponding to around 26 million shares and around half their stake in the satellite operator.
Eutelsat is the owner of the satellite internet provider OneWeb, which it merged with in 2023 in a bid to challenge Starlink’s dominance in the market.
But the French group has struggled to tap into the U.S. company’s market share. Eutelsat currently has more than 600 satellites in orbit compared to Starlink’s over 6,750, according to the companies’ websites.
After soaring more than 600% in early March this year, as Europe scrambled to bolster its tech sovereignty in the wake of the U.S. cutting military support to Ukraine, Eutelsat shares have since dropped more than 70%.
The company is seen as crucial to Europe’s tech sovereignty ambitions. In June the French state led a 1.35 billion euro ($1.57 billion) investment in Eutelsat, becoming its biggest shareholder with a roughly 30% stake.
Tech sovereignty
In November SoftBank said it had sold its entire stake in U.S. chipmaker Nvidia as it looked to free up funds for its investment in OpenAI and other projects.
SoftBank wouldn’t have made the move if it didn’t need to bankroll its next artificial intelligence investments, founder Masayoshi Son said on Monday at an event.
The Japanese giant’s Eutelsat move mirrors its “aggressive monetisation” across its portfolio, Luke Kehoe, analyst at Ookla, told CNBC.
“With governments and strategic European investors, not SoftBank, now funding the recapitalisation, Eutelsat is becoming less a growth story and more a pillar of Europe’s digital sovereignty infrastructure.”
While Starlink is holding on to its scale advantage and is dominant in retail broadband, Eutelsat is carving out a niche in government, aviation, backhaul and emergency connectivity, said Kehoe.
“The open question is whether that higher-value, B2B-centric positioning can deliver attractive returns once the current wave of capex and recapitalisations is behind it, and whether Europe is willing to keep writing cheques at the scale required to narrow the gap with Starlink.”
Eutelsat and SoftBank have been approached for comment.
