GomSpace posted 441.8 million SEK in revenue for 2025, a 72 percent increase over the previous year and the company’s first profitable full year as a publicly traded smallsat manufacturer. The turnaround happened under Carsten Drachmann, who took over as CEO in March 2023 with a mandate to convert a company known for engineering nanosatellites into one that could produce them at industrial scale.
Drachmann spent 20 years at Nokia before entering the space sector, holding leadership roles that spanned operations, sales, and international market expansion. He brought a telecommunications manufacturer’s instinct for repeatability to a company that had historically operated closer to a research lab than a factory floor. The shift has been visible in GomSpace’s contract pipeline: less bespoke engineering, more serial production for institutional and defense customers.
The defense pivot has been particularly pronounced. In December 2025, GomSpace won a 50 million SEK microsatellite contract for European defense R&D. In March 2026, the company joined a €15.7 million European Defence Agency consortium developing a very low Earth orbit military satellite concept, and separately secured a €7.6 million deal with Rome-based VirtuaLabs for a defense-grade radio frequency monitoring cluster. The common thread is European sovereign capability: governments that once procured satellites one at a time are now asking for constellations, and GomSpace is positioning itself as the production line.
The commercial order book has kept pace. GomSpace signed a €19.5 million deal with an unnamed European constellation operator in June 2025, continued building satellites for French maritime intelligence firm Unseenlabs, and joined ESA’s RAMSES asteroid mission. To support the volume, the company signed a strategic production agreement with Danish manufacturer NECAS in July 2025, expanding its capacity for subsystem assembly and shortening lead times. Across its history, GomSpace has delivered platforms for more than 75 satellite missions.
At SmallSat Europe, Drachmann is a standalone speaker on the program. His presence intersects most directly with the panel “The Flexible Factory: Mastering High-Mix, Serial Production for Diverse Manifests,” which examines how automation and digital twins are enabling manufacturers to fulfill varying mission manifests without sacrificing speed. GomSpace’s NECAS partnership and defense production contracts are a live case study for that conversation.
Europe’s defense procurement budgets are expanding, and the institutional demand for sovereign smallsat manufacturing has never been clearer. Drachmann’s bet is that the company that masters repeatable production will capture the orders. A 75-mission track record and a single profitable year make the case. Larger primes moving down into the smallsat class will test it.
