A major analyst initiation from Berenberg sent two underperforming space stocks sharply higher in Wednesday morning trading, spotlighting a deepening fault line in sector valuations.
AST SpaceMobile (NASDAQ: ASTS) surged 11% to $62.36, marking its sharpest single-session gain in weeks, while Planet Labs (NYSE: PL) climbed 5% to $20.14 on the same initiation coverage.
Berenberg analyst Michael Filatov initiated AST SpaceMobile, Planet Labs, and Rocket Lab (NASDAQ: RKLB) all at Buy in a sweeping new sector launch covering the commercial space industry.
AST SpaceMobile drew the highest price target of the group at $92, with Filatov describing the company as “the only company to have demonstrated true cellular broadband from space to unmodified smartphones.”
Filatov cited more than 60 mobile network operator partnerships covering roughly 3 billion subscribers as a core pillar of his bullish thesis on the stock.
Planet Labs received a $25 price target, with Filatov calling the company “the only company imaging the entire Earth daily” and pointing to a backlog up 72% year over year to roughly $906 million.
Rocket Lab received an $83 price target, with Filatov naming the company “the only end-to-end public pure-play in space,” rounding out his three-stock sector initiation.
Filatov framed his broader sector view around falling launch costs pushing the space economy past $500 billion in 2025, alongside defense space spending of $74 billion and a U.S. Space Force fiscal 2027 budget request that more than doubled from the prior year.
The Procure Space ETF (NYSEARCA: UFO) rose just 0.2% to $42.83, signaling that today’s buying was an initiation-driven bounce in laggards rather than a broad sector rotation.
Through Tuesday’s close, ASTS was down 23% year to date and PL was down 2% year to date, while the Procure Space ETF had gained 11% over the same period.
AST SpaceMobile’s connectivity thesis hinges on constellation deployment reaching scale, with the company launching BlueBirds 8 through 10 in June and BlueBirds 11 through 13 in August, moving toward the 45 satellites needed to open commercial service.
SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) provided the Falcon 9 rocket for the August launch, underlining the cross-company dependencies shaping the commercial space build-out.
Planet Labs trades on a fundamentally different premise, with its moat rooted in an imagery archive and daily global coverage that competitors cannot quickly replicate.
The divergence in price moves between the two stocks reflects how the market is pricing connectivity milestones that are still ahead versus an imaging revenue stream already flowing through the backlog.
Planet Labs is scheduled to report quarterly results after the close on September 3, which will be the next critical test of the backlog figures underpinning the Berenberg thesis.
