GMV shows the King of Spain its technologies for satellite control, exploration of the cosmos and defense
The Spanish business and industrial group GMV enjoys renown and prestige in the aerospace and defence sector worldwide and its products and services are present in space agencies, satellite operators and large companies on all five continents.
Created in 1984 as a private and independent company, characteristics that it maintains despite temptations, GMV has just closed its 40th anniversary year with the visit of the King of Spain to its headquarters. For the occasion, the group's management team has exhibited before Felipe VI its main technological innovations in the segments in which it offers high strategic competences: space, aeronautics, defence and security, intelligent transport systems, cybersecurity, and digital public services.
This was emphasised by the group's president, Mónica Martinez, who stressed to the monarch that GMV is ‘a Spanish multinational that is committed to talent and innovation in order to compete with the best’. That its team of ‘almost 3,500 professionals’ has made it ‘the sixth largest space industrial group in Europe in terms of the number of employees’ and a ‘global benchmark in advanced technologies, with clients on all five continents and competing with major companies worldwide’.
The president assures that GMV maintains the ‘spirit of innovation, commitment and vocation for excellence that has characterised our organisation since its origins’. This is borne out by the provisional figures for the group's economic income in 2024, which, pending consolidation, GMV's general manager since 2009, Jesús Serrano, has told ATALAYAR ‘are between 450 and 470 million euros’, representing an increase of between 17 and 22 percent over 2023, when the turnover amounted to 384.38 million.
Of the turnover recorded in the year just ended, Serrano pointed out that ‘around 75 percent came from the international market’ and that ‘around two thirds of the turnover - around 300 million - corresponds to the space sector’, which is structured into two major business units, both of which have managed to position GMV as a prime contractor.
Presence even in the antipodes of Spain
One branch is dedicated to the development of Space Systems. Its CEO since 2022 is Enrique Fraga and it encompasses the competencies of Earth observation, exploration, science, space transport and security, as well as satellite telecommunications. The other is Satellite Navigation Systems, which will also be headed by Miguel Romay from 2022. Specific examples of success stories were shown to Felipe VI, especially the replica in GMV's headquarters of the operational ground control centres of the Galileo constellation, located in Oberpfaffenhofen (Germany) and Fucino (Italy).
Víctor Pozo and Ana Romero, director and head of cybersecurity, respectively, of the replica of both control centres, explained to Felipe VI that this is a ‘fundamental infrastructure for the correct functioning of the whole constellation’, since among its main responsibilities are those of designing, developing, integrating and deploying improved versions of software.
On the screens in the room supervised by Víctor Pozo and Ana Romero, ‘the telemetry of all the Galileo satellites is received, their state of health is verified, and we generate and send all the signals’. In addition to working on the second generation of Galileo, all the new versions of algorithms are integrated, ‘which we then install in control rooms in Germany, Italy and in remote stations around the world’.
One of the group's latest achievements came in mid-December, when the European Union Space Programme Agency (EUSPA) awarded a €6 million contract to a GMV-led industrial team to develop new services for the Galileo Emergency Alert System, or ERAS. It is due to be operational in the first half of 2026, to enable civil protection organisations in EU countries to transmit alert messages to individual smartphones and inform their owners of areas affected or at risk from disasters.
The group has even made its mark in the antipodes of Spain, in Oceania, where it won the largest contract awarded to a Spanish space company outside the geographical framework of the European Union. There, GMV is the latest to develop the processing and control centres of SouthPAN, the joint navigation and positioning system of Australia and New Zealand to provide critical services to their mining, energy, transport and agricultural sectors.
With 11 subsidiaries in Europe, America and Asia
In satellite communications, the group leads the consortium of companies in the GovSatCom programme, a Brussels initiative to provide secure satellite communications services to EU government users for critical infrastructure management and crisis situations.
Another area that has been growing in strength in GMV is Defence and Security, which has been headed by Manuel Pérez for more than a decade. Its Director of Business Development, José Prieto, explained to the King the company's contribution to the SISCAP programme. This is the so-called ‘blind’ computer - because it has no display screen - but which, by means of microcomputers, integrates the command and control capacity, the signals from the optronic sensors, the management and recharging of the batteries and sends them to the soldier's visor.
The chairman of the group's Space Council, Miguel Ángel Molina, confirmed that Airbus Space Systems GmbH, the prime contractor for the Bundeswehr's SatcomBw-3 pair of secure communications satellites, has selected GMV to provide the control software and all the ground segment components of the new control and tracking centre for both satellites.
The King of Spain also witnessed the demonstration of a GMV-developed four-wheeled vehicle for driving on the Red Planet and of the ‘Cat’ satellite capture system. Conceived by GMV's Science, Exploration and Transport strategy and business development team, headed by Mariella Graziano, it is a kind of claw for catching satellites and guiding them towards Earth, so that they are destroyed in the upper layers of the atmosphere and do not generate waste in space.
GMV's professional staff is made up of some 3,500 professionals, 92 percent of them engineers, distributed among its various sites in Spain (Barcelona, Madrid, Seville, Valencia, Valladolid and Zaragoza) and its 11 subsidiaries in Europe (Germany, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, the United Kingdom and Romania), America (Colombia and the United States) and Asia (Malaysia).
The company was founded by Professor Juan José Martinez, Professor of Flight Mechanics at the School of Aeronautical Engineering of the Polytechnic University of Madrid. Its headquarters are located in the Tres Cantos Technology Park, a town just 30 kilometres from the Spanish capital, whose mayor, Jesús Moreno, accompanied Felipe VI on his visit.