@DR
SES was formed in 1985 on the initiative of the Luxembourg government as Société Européenne des Satellites, Europe’s first private satellite operator, and the Luxembourg State remains a major shareholder. The company acquired the Château de Betzdorf in 1986 and made it its headquarters, helping turn a small country into a serious player in space. In 1988 SES launched its first satellite, Astra-1A, to the 19.2° East orbital position, soon carrying Sky, Pro7, Sat.1 and RTL into millions of homes across Europe. The company pioneered co-location, parking several satellites at one orbital slot to multiply the channels a single dish could receive, and by the early 1990s its Astra family was beaming dozens of channels to tens of millions of households . Listed in Luxembourg and on Euronext Paris, it controls the fleet from the Betzdorf campus, where the operations centre overlooks around 100 white antennas.
SES has built much of its scale in the United States. Its first major move came in 2001, when it bought GE Americom from General Electric, renamed it SES Americom and formed SES Global as the new parent. The second came in 2025. SES completed a 3.1 billion dollar acquisition of Intelsat, the satellite operator based in McLean, Virginia, a deal announced the previous year that took more than a year to close and cleared final United States regulatory approvals. It combined the two operators into a fleet of 120 satellites, with the enlarged group keeping its headquarters in Luxembourg and its North American main office in McLean.
The combined company operates around 90 geostationary satellites and nearly 30 in medium earth orbit, supported by a global ground network and spectrum across the C, Ku, Ka, X and UHF bands. Together the two businesses reported 2024 revenue of about 3.7 billion euros and a contract backlog near 8 billion euros, serving broadcasters, telecom operators, airlines, shipping lines and governments. The enlarged group employs roughly 4,000 people and expects to save some 370 million euros a year by combining fleets, engineering and ground networks, savings valued at about 2.4 billion euros over time and the scale it argues is needed to compete with newcomers such as Starlink. Its medium-orbit O3b mPOWER system delivers low-latency broadband to ships, aircraft and remote sites. CEO Adel Al-Saleh leads the group from two centres of gravity, Betzdorf in Luxembourg and McLean in Virginia, four decades after Astra-1A first reached orbit.
