[Satellite News 03-25-09] International space company, GMV, has been quite active in the commercial market, acquiring work for the satellite industry’s biggest operators. While GMV customers like SES, Eutelsat and NileSat have appeared to be minimally impacted by the economy, GMV CEO Jesus Serrano said that despite his own growth projections, he is preparing for a slowdown just in case the economy doesn’t pick up.
    “The most important issues in 2009 will center on these operators and how the economic crisis may impact their business. From our perspective, we feel as though they had plans to acquire new satellites, and they are now slowing down the decision making processes for new satellites and ground infrastructure,” said Serrano.
    Serrano spoke with Satellite News News Editor Jeffrey Hill at the opening of Satellite 2009 on what GMV will be focusing on during the conference and what it hopes to take away from it.

Serrano: We have been extremely active in the ground systems arena lately, so our objective here is to try and much obtain information as possible to see how the market will evolve in the coming months or years.

Serrano: The Satellite conference is mainly devoted to telecoms satellites. The thing we are bringing today, in addition to satellite communications, are developments in maritime systems using different kinds of satellites in order to support and solve the needs of users.
    We are combining the use of telecoms satellites with the use of GPS and remote sensing satellites, to differentiate and/or deploy GPS networks in Europe, as well as Asia.
In remote sensing, we are working quite significantly in Europe in the GMES program, in order to take advantage of satellites to identify vessels, which are not allowed for immigration – which is a key issue in the European Union. Spain and Portugal have problems in this area. Telecoms is a very important field. Even if you use these satellites for imaging, you need them to give information to a control center, and one could expect development of satellite communications based on new applications, based on navigation.

Serrano: It does not appear as though the crisis has had so much impact on the satellite operators. But, I don’t know whether they are starting to feel something – maybe starting to change in terms of acquiring satellites. It’s true that the impact of the crisis in the satellite market has not been as big as it has been in other markets. The primary reason, in my opinion, is that satellite contracts are very long. The plans for investments are medium to long-term plans.
    I would expect satellite operators would need new funding when looking to acquire new satellites. This could be an issue. If the economic crisis is as strong as it is expected to be, there maybe reductions in selling satellite capacity. The demand for capacity could reduce, so therefore, they might not need so much new capacity. So, plans for new satellites might shift for the future and there could be a stop in the demand for this capacity.

Serrano: I expect we will see the worst of the economic crisis this year, and perhaps, we will start to recover next year. The gap between the start and stop of new programs could be quite short. But, this might be just a wish of ours, rather than expectation.

Serrano: We have been helped by our diversity as we have revenues of $110 million, with more than 50 percent of that in the space sector. We have other sectors where the crisis has had a small impact. In the space sector, we have seen pretty much no impact.
    We are also quite diverse in terms of geographies in where we operate. We are a very global company. We have geographical diversification, as well as diversification in the sectors in which we operate. We are expecting revenue growth of 3 to 4 percent this year. This is quite reasonable in these circumstances.