OHB SE

OHB grew out of a small Bremen engineering firm that Manfred Fuchs and his wife Christa took over in 1981, and it now sits among the handful of companies that build most of Europe's satellites. Around 3,600 people work at 15 sites in ten countries. Revenue reached 1.25 billion euros in 2025 against an order backlog of 3.2 billion, the largest the company has recorded. The Fuchs family still controls more than 60 percent of the shares. KKR came in as a minority investor after a takeover offer in 2023 that the family declined to sell into, a plan to take the company off the exchange was abandoned at the capital markets day in January 2026, a 484 million euro capital increase followed, and the shares joined the SDAX in August 2026.

Space Systems is the largest of the three segments and the one defence ministries care about. OHB System AG built the five SAR-Lupe radar reconnaissance satellites that gave Germany its own imaging capability from 2007, then won the 816 million euro follow-on, SARah, delivering two of the three spacecraft using the reflector antenna approach that is its speciality. Heinrich Hertz, launched in 2023 on the company's SmallGEO platform, carries secure communications payloads for the Bundeswehr alongside its research mission. Civil work sits beside it. OHB System is prime contractor for the Galileo navigation satellites, with orders covering 34 of them, builds all six Meteosat Third Generation platforms and is prime for the two sounding satellites in that family, and delivered the EnMAP hyperspectral observatory and the EDRS-C laser relay satellite. Science missions include PLATO, the exoplanet hunter due for launch in 2027, the Hera asteroid probe launched in October 2024, and LISA, the gravitational wave observatory that brought an 839 million euro prime contract in 2025 and is the biggest single award in company history. OHB Italia supplied the microwave imager for the MetOp-SG weather satellites, and Electra was built for SES as the first all-electric SmallGEO.

Access to Space was called Aerospace until a 2025 reorganisation that followed OHB buying the last 30 percent of MT Aerospace. The Augsburg subsidiary makes tanks, load-bearing structures and booster housings, has supplied every Ariane generation, and holds series production of Ariane 6 flight models 16 through 42. It has worked on launch site infrastructure at Kourou for close to three decades. OHB also holds a stake in Rocket Factory Augsburg, whose RFA ONE small launcher is being readied at SaxaVord in Shetland. Digital is the smallest segment and the least visible. It covers satellite operation, ground segments, antennas and telescopes, and the applications built on the data. OHB Digital Services, founded as megatel in 1989, does secure digitalisation, embedded software and asset tracking. OHB Teledata works on railway signalling, electrification and critical infrastructure cybersecurity, with Deutsche Bahn among its customers. COSMOS International Satellitenstart, set up in 1995, procures launches. That segment took more than 250 million euros of orders in its record year.