European telecoms: SpaceX's US cell-site ambitions continue to raise US competition concerns, but spectrum sovereignty should leave Europe

Press reports suggest SpaceX is in discussions to secure 80k cell sites across the US. This is a major step towards potentially entering the market as a fourth nationwide mobile player through a hybrid terrestrial/satellite network and follows its agreement to acquire 800MHz of spectrum in the US. The spectrum acquisition raised material US competition concerns. While this is a US-specific deployment, the news is likely to also weigh on European telco shares. However, we continue to argue that Europe is much more insulated from the risk of SpaceX emerging as a scale mobile entrant, largely due to spectrum sovereignty concerns and regulation that limit the likelihood of it securing enough spectrum for large-scale plans. More recently, European lawmakers have become increasingly public about these concerns: the lead negotiator on the Digital Networks Act has confirmed that his draft report includes strict sovereignty and resilience criteria for pan-European mobile spectrum licenses. Our