In January 2022, the European Union Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA) published the first issue of the Earth Observation (EO) & Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Market Report.
The Report provides insights into how EO and GNSS contribute to a wide number of applications across 17 market segments, ranging from agriculture and forestry, to tourism and health, up to emergency management, finance and insurance.
Looking at EO, the report estimates that, over the next decade, revenues will double from roughly €2.8 billion to over €5.5 billion over the next decade.
Value-added services account for the largest part of global revenues (around 85%). These are relevant to all market segments analysed and particularly to those related to climate services, urban development and cultural heritage, agriculture, energy and raw materials and insurance and finance.
Other revenues (around 15%) come from the sale of EO data. Here, top five segments include urban development and cultural heritage, agriculture, insurance and finance, energy and raw materials as well as consumer solutions, tourism and health.
The Report highlights how the growing use of parametric insurance products for disaster resilience frameworks by commercial entities in areas with high exposure to extreme events will result in a fast growing uptake of EO especially in the insurance and finance sector.
The European EO industry is dominated by SMEs and start-ups, accounting for more than 93% of total companies active in this field.
Europe (41% share) and USA (42% share) lead the market for EO, with Europe playing a key role especially in those value-added services that are closest to end users (analysis, insights and decision support applications). Here, European companies lead the market across almost all segments, excluding the emergency management and humanitarian aid segment (led by Asian companies with 52%) and the niche of road and automotive (led by US companies with 77%). Main challenges for European companies are currently in the agriculture and insurance and finance segment, where competition of US companies is strong.
Over the next decade, accelerating Europe’s engagement in space will key to enable the green transition in the Green Deal framework. Therefore, challenges and opportunities in the various market segments will be many, with an extremely high growth potential for European companies.
In this context, SURPRISE will bring an important contribution, helping to improve EO by harnessing SLM and CS, to enhance capability in spatial resolution, on-board data processing and encryption functionalities.