Airbus, Leonardo and Thales Press Brussels to Clear “Project Bromo,” Their 25,000-Staff Space Merger, as Germany's OHB Raises Capital and Objects

Guillaume Faury of Airbus and Leonardo's new chief executive, Lorenzo Mariani, in remarks reported by the Financial Times, called on Brussels to clear Project Bromo, the working title for the combination of the three groups' space businesses into a single Toulouse-based company. The merged entity would employ around 25,000 people and generate some €6.5 billion in annual revenue, with ownership split Airbus 35 percent, Leonardo 32.5 percent and Thales 32.5 percent under a memorandum signed in October 2025. The companies are close to filing a formal request with EU competition authorities but have not yet done so; a decision is not expected before the second half of 2027.

Faury framed consolidation as survival, warning that without scale Europe would slip “from the Champions League to lower divisions” against Elon Musk's SpaceX and its Starlink network. The case is a test of the Commission's new, more scale-friendly merger guidelines and its space-sovereignty goals. Not everyone in European space wants it cleared: Germany's OHB and Spain's Indra Space have lodged competition concerns, and OHB's chief executive, Marco Fuchs, said in May the firm would consider a legal challenge if Brussels approved the deal, calling it “rather a disturbance of the market.” On 22 June OHB launched its own share placement at €300 a share — up to €510.7 million, later upsized to about €900 million — roughly tripling its free float and paring the stake of its backer KKR.

The proprietary read. The consolidation Europe says it needs against American rivals keeps colliding with the competition it means to preserve at home. Bromo's logic is sound — three sub-scale national champions cannot each match SpaceX, and a single MBDA-style prime is the obvious answer. But the same scale that makes the merged group viable against Starlink makes it dominant over OHB, Indra and the supply chain that would then have to buy from it. Brussels has drafted guidelines that lean toward the champion; what its decision settles, as Signal No. 89 noted, is whether “European sovereignty” now means one continental prime or a competitive field — and the two are starting to pull apart.