OHB's €484M Capital Raise Backs a Growth Story Still Wrestling With Its Bottom Line

OHB SE reports strong H1 2026 revenue growth but Q2 net loss; confirms €484M capital raise and SDAX promotion.

The arithmetic at OHB SE is getting harder to ignore. Europe's space and defence contractor pulled in €627.9 million in total output for the first half of 2026, an 11 percent jump from the €563.5 million posted a year earlier, while adjusted EBITDA climbed 31 percent to €60.4 million. On those numbers alone, the Bremen-based group looks like a company firing on all cylinders. Yet the net result tells a more complicated story — and it is that tension, rather than the headline growth, that investors are now weighing.

The operative engine is running hot, but the profit-and-loss account is leaking. OHB swung to a net loss of roughly €5 million in the second quarter, dragged down by sharply higher costs and losses on equity investments. A year earlier, the same quarter had produced a €7.5 million profit. The gap between robust operational momentum and a negative bottom line is the kind of discrepancy that tends to keep analysts busy — and it raises legitimate questions about how much of the group's expansion is actually converting into shareholder value.

That expansion now has a much larger financial runway. OHB confirmed a capital increase of €484 million alongside its half-year results, with net proceeds earmarked for manufacturing capacity, potential acquisitions, and investments in launch vehicles and facilities. The placement pushed the free float to roughly 18 percent, though the Fuchs family retains majority control with over 60 percent of shares. The timing is deliberate: the company is simultaneously deepening its involvement in major German defence initiatives and broadening its international order book, most recently with the Italian space agency ASI's PRISMA Second Generation Earth-observation mission, awarded to OHB Italia in late July with a launch target of end-2031.

The market's response to all this has been characteristically mixed. Jefferies reaffirmed its "Buy" rating on August 11 with a price target of €280, a level the stock has yet to reclaim — it closed Friday at €257.00, down 1.0 percent on the day. The weekly picture is friendlier, with a 10 percent gain, helped by the company's unscheduled promotion to the SDAX last Thursday. The index upgrade and the half-year figures were broadly well received, even if the trading has since cooled.

Order visibility remains the strongest pillar of the bull case. The group's backlog reached €3.304 billion after six months, up from €3.067 billion a year earlier, and management expects order intake to peak in the second half of 2026. That expectation underpins the reaffirmed full-year guidance of roughly €1.4 billion in total output and an adjusted EBITDA margin between 10.5 and 11.0 percent. Further out, OHB is targeting total output above €4.0 billion and an adjusted EBITDA margin of around 13 percent — ambitions that presuppose both sustained growth and disciplined cost control.

The second quarter's divergence between operating strength and net weakness is a reminder that those two conditions do not automatically travel together. The capital raise gives OHB the balance-sheet firepower to pursue its strategy organically and through acquisitions, and the confirmed guidance provides a clear benchmark for the months ahead. Whether the anticipated order-intake surge materialises in the second half — and whether it finally closes the gap between operational performance and the bottom line — will likely determine the stock's next meaningful move.