WASHINGTON — OHB and investment firm KKR have received all the government approvals needed for a deal that will take the space company off the public markets in the coming days.
OHB announced Aug. 27 that it received the final regulatory approvals for a deal announced a little more than a year ago where KKR would acquire nearly all the publicly traded shares in the company, allowing OHB to delist from Germany’s Xetra exchange. The deal is expected to close no later than Sept. 9.
The companies did not disclose the details of that final approval, but in an earnings call Aug. 8, Marco Fuchs, chief executive of OHB, said Belgium was the final company still reviewing the deal. He suggested that both Belgium got a late start reviewing the deal and that “changes to their processes recently” slowed that effort.
OHB announced in August 2024 the deal where KKR would buy shares not owned by the Fuchs family for 44 euros ($48.70) per share. Under the deal, the Fuchs family will maintain its controlling 65.4% ownership of OHB while KKR owns 28.6%. That combined 94% ownership will allow OHB to delist from the exchange, effectively taking the company private.
“In KKR, we have found the ideal minority investor who supports our long-term growth and with whom we can successfully implement our corporate strategy,” Fuchs said in a statement. The deal, he added, “allows our previous shareholders to benefit from the long-term value increase of OHB and at the same time paves the way for our delisting.”
“KKR supports the goal of developing OHB into a European space champion and making an important contribution to Europe’s sovereignty in space,” said Christian Ollig, partner and head of the DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) region of KKR, in the statement.
Fuchs said last November that he did not feel the public markets properly valued smaller companies like his, and that the public markets in general were tough for space companies, noting the problems that companies that went public through special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) mergers experienced.
“We saw all these SPACs fail. We see very different valuations out there. So, it’s not a good place to be, in the public market, especially in the core business model of doing space projects,” he said at the Space Tech Expo Europe conference. “It’s not exactly what capital markets appreciate.”
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Jeff Foust writes about space policy, commercial space, and related topics for SpaceNews.He earned a Ph.D. in planetary sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a bachelor’s degree with honors in geophysics and planetary science...More by Jeff Foust
