EARSC presents State and Health of the European Earth Observation Sector 2020

Earlier this week the European Association of Remote Sensing Companies (EARSC) presented its latest industry survey into the state and health of the Earth Observation (EO) sector in Europe. The full report can be downloaded here.

Below points describe the key strategic context in which the European Earth Observation services industry was operating in 2019:

• The EC has proposed a new EU Space programme with an overall budget of €16b of which €5.8b is proposed for Copernicus.
• The ESA ministers agreed an ambitious budget for Earth Observation of €2.5b for the next 5 years
• The Copernicus programme continues to have a strong influence on the European EO sector as an important reference customer for data and for services as well as source of free and open data. Five DIAS (Data Access and Information Services) launched in 2018, start to become operational leveraging commercial assets alongside Free and Open Sentinel data.
• Italy launched Prisma as well as a new Cosmo-Skymed Satellite. In the commercial domain there were launches from Iceye, Planet, Blackrock and Spire.
• There were two mergers announced involving European companies namely CLS acquired SIRS and CGI acquired Scisys (UK), In addition in early 2019, Planet announced the acquisition of Boundless Spatial.
• Technology continues to evolve at a rapid rate with the latest focus being on Artificial Intelligence as a tool to extract more information and faster from satellite images.

Key statistics of the European EO sector at a glance in below image. These numbers are derived from direct research on over 500 companies, and a survey sample of 80 companies.

Any comments or questions relating to this survey, please contact EARSC at info@earsc.org