The Globe and Mail reports in its Monday edition that Airbus SE is looking at opportunities to create scale in defence and satellite markets, chief executive officer Guillaume Faury said on Sunday. A Reuters dispatch to The Globe says that Airbus and France's Thales are exploring a tie-up of some space activities as new competition disrupts the sector. Preliminary talks were focusing on the companies' overlapping satellite activities. "We are looking at opportunities to create scale, and that's true in defence, that's true in space, and in particular on satellites," Mr. Faury said, ahead of this week's Farnborough Airshow. "We would be happy to find ways to create scale in the space environment in Europe in general." Airbus and Thales Alenia Space, in which Italy's Leonardo holds a 33-per-cent interest, are Europe's largest makers of satellites for telecom, navigation and surveillance. Demand for their geostationary satellites is increasingly under pressure as traditional manufacturers face competition from massive constellations of expendable satellites in low-Earth orbit, like the Starlink network of Elon Musk's SpaceX. Airbus last month took a 900-million-euro charge on its struggling space services business.