During a company visit organised with Club GALAXIE on Friday 20 September to the MAP SPACE COATINGS’ industrial site in Mazères (France - Ariège), Pierre Valenti, CEO, and Bertrand d’Arzac, Chairman of MAP Holding, presented the new strategic directions of the French company, a key player in the space market.
With the recent appointment of Pierre Valenti as its CEO, MAP SPACE COATINGS has embarked on a change management project over the last few months aimed at optimising its organisation and adapting its positioning, placing its customers at the heart of its concerns.
While the technical robustness of MAP SPACE COATINGS no longer needs to be demonstrated, the SME now has the ambition to reposition its activities with a view to penetrating its ecosystem in the broadest sense: both by strengthening existing partnerships with major systems manufacturers from the Legacy Space sector, and by creating new opportunities with players from the New Space sector and developing its export activities.
Against a backdrop of profound upheaval in the space sector in recent years, MAP SPACE COATINGS, a specialist in coatings for satellites and launchers, has initiated a reorganisation of its activities. The aim of this corporate project is to assert its new position as a trusted third party and a key partner for the space ecosystem.
Following the appointment in April 2024 of Pierre Valenti as Chief Executive Officer of MAP SPACE COATINGS, alongside Bertrand d’Arzac, Chairman of MAP Holding, the company is now structured around 3 collaborative operational departments:
- Sales Department, responsible for meeting the needs of MAP SPACE COATINGS' customers and partners and structuring its offering with a view to winning new markets;
- Technical Innovation Department, responsible for managing and implementing innovation projects alongside MAP SPACE COATINGS' customers and partners, whether they are institutional (space agencies, research centres, universities, etc.) or industrial;
- Operations Management, ensuring that projects are properly managed.
"Our ambition is to lead a change management project that is coherent, ambitious and transparent, based on the expertise of our three operational departments, all working in concert with the company's General Management", comments Pierre Valenti. "The challenge is to capitalise on MAP SPACE COATINGS' technical robustness and its heritage of over 30 years, with a view to maintaining business relations with our longstanding customers and partners, while at the same time creating opportunities for collaboration with new players in the space industry. Our aim is to strengthen and diversify our offering for the New Space and export markets", explains the CEO.
Launched in spring this year, MAP SPACE COATINGS' new strategy is already bearing fruit, notably with the sealing of two historic partnerships with Thales Alenia Space and Airbus Defence & Space, with whom MAP SPACE COATINGS has just signed multi-year framework agreements. Similar commercial initiatives are under way with other players in the space ecosystem, both in France and abroad.
In line with this dynamic, the French company has also just joined the GALAXIE Club, the Aerospace Valley competitiveness cluster and the Van Allen Foundation, thus widening the base of its levers of influence and increasing its visibility in the fast-changing space ecosystem.
During the visit organised with Club GALAXIE, Pierre Valenti also underlined the uniqueness of the value proposition offered by MAP SPACE COATINGS, which lies in the integrated service it offers its customers as a true "one-stop shop":
" What makes our company unique is our ability to produce the raw materials and apply them using the cutting-edge industrial resources[1]
at our disposal, while at the same time offering our customers the skills and experience of our Technical Innovation Department to support them in their future thinking. All from a single location. This is a key differentiator that few of our competitors can boast today, even outside Europe. ”
[1] Club GALAXIE is a key player in the French space industry, and has been working for over 20 years to develop and promote the sector in the Occitanie region..
About MAP SPACE COATINGS
Founded in 1986, MAP SPACE COATINGS is a French SME based in Mazères (09) specialising in the design, manufacture and application of surface coatings for satellites and launchers. The company works for manufacturers in a wide range of sectors (space, aeronautics, electronics, defence, etc.) in close collaboration with leading technical partners such as space agencies (CNES, ESA), universities and research centres such as ONERA.
In the space sector (which accounts for more than 90% of its turnover), MAP SPACE COATINGS supplies coatings for satellites manufactured by Airbus Defence and Space and Thales Alenia Space, as well as for Ariane 6, Vega and KSLV-2 launchers. Its customers also include a number of key players in the New Space ecosystem, including Anywaves, Comat, Exotrail, HEMERIA and MECANO ID. Notable achievements include MAP SPACE COATINGS' work on the Supercam on board the Perseverance rover launched by NASA in July 2020.
With around twenty employees, MAP SPACE COATINGS is expected to generate sales of around €9 million in 2023. The company is 100% owned by MAP Holding. • map-coatings.com