An animated rendering of a Pelican satellite in orbit.
Planet
Satellite imagery and data analysis company Planet announced it had signed a $230 million contract on Wednesday, with an anchor customer furthering the rollout of its next-generation Pelican satellites.
“It is a momentum-building event. … It’s both our biggest deal ever and it’s a significant step for us into this satellite services business,” Planet CEO Will Marshall told CNBC.
Planet’s deal will see it build Pelican satellites in service to a company in the Asia–Pacific region. Planet said the customer will be identified at a later date, but described the company as a long-standing partner. Marshall said the contract covers “a couple of years to construct” the satellites “and then five years of operation.”
“They get dedicated access to the satellites that we’re launching for them within their [area of interest] in Asia, and then for the rest of the world, we get to license that data,” Marshall said.
While the deal does not change Planet’s previous guidance for its fiscal year 2025 fourth-quarter results, the company expects to begin seeing benefits to its balance sheet in fiscal year 2026 — with payments for building the satellites and providing services to be recognized over about seven years.
Planet, which operates more than 200 satellites in orbit, in 2021 unveiled its plans for the more high-powered line of Pelican satellites. Intended to replace the SkySat satellites acquired from Google in 2017, Planet aims to deploy a constellation of as many as 32 Pelican satellites. The company launched its first operational satellite for the constellation, Pelican-2, earlier this month— with the spacecraft notably featuring Nvidia‘s Jetson edge artificial intelligence platform for improved data processing.
“We only had financials to specifically build a subset of [those 32 Pelican satellites], and now we’ve got the financials to build more, and so we’re scaling much faster,” Marshall said.
Shares of Planet were up as much as 8% in premarket trading Wednesday, from a previous close of $5.46 a share, before the Pelican announcement. Planet late Tuesday announced a multi-year contract worth an unspecified amount with the European Space Agency.
Additionally, Marshall said the Pelican deal represents Planet’s entrance into the satellite services market — effectively selling its spacecraft as an adaptable base to specific customers. It’s a market that Planet first dipped into with its Tanager satellite product line, the first of which it built and deployed for the nonprofit group Carbon Mapper.
“These customers are often customers we’ve been working with for years, so they already know and trust our data and our ability to execute. They know we’ve got a vertically integrated stack of tech, so they know we can deliver satellites in space that work and operate,” Marshall said.
“It’s synergistic with our data business,” he added.
Planet went public in 2021 amid the SPAC boom. Like other space companies that went public at that time, Planet’s stock slid steadily in the years following — with company shares getting hit amid missed revenue targets and workforce layoffs — before bouncing back in 2024.
While it lags top-performing space pure-play stocks over the last year, Planet shares have more than doubled in the past 12 months, according to FactSet data.
