OHB – how the “secret” German SpaceX made 15x

Investing in Elon Musk’s SpaceX at an early stage was difficult. Only private market investors could participate.

Getting shares allocated in the upcoming SpaceX IPO may also prove difficult.

Yet, the German equivalent of SpaceX was readily accessible to investors all along – but hardly anyone noticed.

The stock is up 5x over the past six months and more than 15x over the past three years.

OHB SE.

An “overnight success” (that took 25 years)

Germany (and Europe) have received a lot of criticism lately for a perceived lack of innovation and growth.

Yet pockets of innovation and growth do exist if you know where to look.

In the case of OHB SE (ISIN DE0005936124, DE:OHB), you had to look to Bremen, a city long associated with industrial decline. Located on the Weser River in north-west Germany with good access to the North Sea, Bremen was historically renowned for its maritime industry. One of its best-known local champions was Bremer Vulkan, a shipbuilder founded in 1893 that at one point employed tens of thousands of workers. After years of struggling against lower-cost Asian competitors and relying on state support, the company finally collapsed in 1997.

One of the remnants of Bremen’s maritime industry was Otto Hydraulik Bremen, a specialist in hydraulic and electrical systems for ships that at the time employed just five people. In 1981, Christa Fuchs took control of the small firm and applied her skills in strategic management and financial planning. Four years later, her husband Manfred left his job at nearby Airbus and joined the business. He brought with him an idea: develop technologies that would make satellites cheaper and easier to launch and operate.

The company moved into a nearby technology park and developed a range of products, including reusable space labs and drop capsules used in gravity research.

In 1994, OHB launched its first satellite using NASA’s Space Shuttle Discovery.

One year later, Christa and Manfred’s son Marco gave up his legal career in New York and joined the family business. With Marco’s arrival, the company combined managerial, engineering, and legal expertise. It also had a succession plan in place.

Two major breakthroughs followed in the early 2000s.

OHB won the contract to build SAR-Lupe, a reconnaissance system for the Bundeswehr. This transformed the company from a supplier of components into a provider of complete systems.

Around the same time, Marco Fuchs led the company’s IPO on Frankfurt’s Neuer Markt, the ambitious but ultimately ill-fated attempt to create a German equivalent of Nasdaq.

The following years brought cuts to public space budgets and intense pressure on smaller companies. Following its IPO at EUR 10.50 per share, investors initially lost as much as 70% of their money. Less than a year after listing, the stock traded as low as EUR 3.25.

The Fuchs family treated this as a temporary setback and used the IPO proceeds to acquire smaller businesses across Europe. Those acquisitions gradually transformed OHB into a pan-European space company.

Five years later, investors who had bought stock in the IPO finally saw the share price recover to their original purchase price.

Anyone who held on beyond that point did exceptionally well. Earlier this week, enthusiasm surrounding the forthcoming SpaceX IPO helped propel OHB shares to as high as EUR 562.

Few investors were still along for the ride, however.

In 2023, most shareholders sold out to KKR at EUR 44 per share.

Private equity (and a few private investors) spotted the opportunity

By the early 2020s, OHB had become a genuinely European company. It changed its legal structure from a German Aktiengesellschaft (AG) into a Societas Europaea (SE), the pan-European public company structure established under EU law.

OHB operated across three divisions: space systems, aerospace, and digital systems. Its activities included low-orbit and geostationary satellites, software for analysing satellite data, antenna systems, and a wide range of related technologies. The company had become one of Europe’s leading aerospace and space systems suppliers, benefiting both from long-term growth in the space economy and, more recently, from rapidly rising European defence spending.

Despite this, the stock traded for years at valuation multiples that were a fraction of those assigned to comparable companies elsewhere.

In 2023, OHB generated revenue of more than EUR 1.1bn and achieved a net profit margin of almost 4%. Revenue of more than EUR 1.3bn was already expected for 2024.

At the time, investors valued SpaceX at 27x revenue. OHB, on the other hand, traded at just 0.7x revenue. The German company was also valued at less than 8x EV/EBITDA, making it cheap in absolute terms. With a market cap of EUR 550m, the stock was sufficiently liquid for private investors and smaller funds to build meaningful positions.

Few outside investors would ultimately benefit from what happened next. In mid-2023, KKR moved in with an offer for the shares not already controlled by the Fuchs family. In effect, KKR and the Fuchs family teamed up to take OHB private. Following a tender offer at EUR 44 per share – a 39% premium to the prevalent share price – the Fuchs family controlled 65% of the company, while KKR owned 29%.

The family was quite open about the rationale. Smaller listed companies, particularly space companies, were trading at depressed valuations. As CEO Marco Fuchs explained at the time: “I don’t believe in public markets for the time being in space. … It’s not a good place to be, in the public market, especially in the core business model of doing space projects. … It’s not exactly what capital markets appreciate. … By going private, the goal is making OHB hopefully a more agile and more dynamic company.“

Source: SpaceNews, 16 November 2023.

OHB’s intention was to delist the company altogether. However, a number of shareholders refused to sell. As a result, the stock remained tradable, albeit with very limited liquidity and primarily through regional German exchanges such as Hamburg. Investors who were aware of the situation could still buy shares and effectively use OHB as a publicly traded proxy for the anticipated SpaceX hype.

That proved rewarding. Since KKR’s investment, the stock has risen dramatically.

A remarkable reversal

KKR is now reportedly looking to place part of its holding with other investors. In a remarkable 180-degree turn, OHB is once again seeking to become a fully functioning publicly listed company. With Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and JP Morgan reportedly advising on the placement, OHB could soon have a sufficiently large free float to attract a much broader investor base.

Earlier this month, Marco Fuchs “dismissed any talk of a delisting, saying customers value the transparency that comes with a stock market listing“.

How times change!

Meanwhile, OHB’s business is firing on all cylinders. The company’s order book has reached EUR 3.3bn, up 45% year-on-year. Profit margins have increased from 4% when KKR invested to 6% today. Management is targeting average annual order intake of approximately EUR 3bn, supported by rising budgets from the European Space Agency, the European Union and national governments, as well as a growing defence business.

Source: Reuters, 25 March 2026.

It has now been exactly 25 years since OHB first listed with a market cap of just EUR 24m. Today, the company is worth EUR 11bn. The planned SpaceX IPO has brought renewed attention to a stock that many investors had long forgotten.

Of course, IPOs often coincide with peaks in investor enthusiasm. Some investors joke that IPO stands for “Inevitably Painful Outcome”.

OHB shareholders experienced this when the company first went public.

Is OHB still worth chasing at current levels, in order to benefit from continued enthusiasm surrounding the space sector?

You be the judge.

As far as I am concerned, OHB’s recent performance is a reminder that European markets still contain hidden champions trading at bargain prices. When these businesses combine strong industrial capabilities with improved capital allocation and a willingness to think bigger, they can turn into surprising outperformers.

No doubt, there are plenty more cases like OHB waiting to be discovered.