Rocket Lab, the launch company Peter Beck founded in Auckland in 2006, has posted the biggest quarter in its history and lost money doing it. Revenue for the three months to 30 June came in at US$234.1 million, up 62 percent on the same quarter last year and about US$34 million ahead of the previous record set three months earlier. The results were released after the New York market closed on Monday, United States time.
Product revenue, which covers satellites and spacecraft components, made up US$181.3 million of the total. Services, which is mostly launch, contributed US$52.7 million. Gross profit nearly doubled to US$84.6 million from US$46.4 million a year earlier, and the reported gross margin lifted to 36.1 percent.
Underneath the growth the company is still unprofitable. Rocket Lab reported a net loss of US$49.3 million for the quarter, or 8 US cents a share, narrower than the US$66 million loss a year earlier but a loss all the same. On the adjusted earnings measure the company prefers, it was US$8.8 million in the red. Nineteen years after the first Rocket Lab company was registered, the business has never turned an annual profit.
What investors were told to look at instead was the order book. Rocket Lab finished the quarter with a backlog of US$2.36 billion, up 137 percent in a year and the largest it has ever held. More than US$437 million of new launch contracts were signed during the quarter and in the weeks after it, taking the launch backlog past 90 missions. The company said it had already entered into more than US$1 billion in new contracts across launch and space systems in the current quarter, before that quarter is even finished.
“Q2 was another fantastic quarter for Rocket Lab, highlighted by record results and massive momentum that has continued well after the close,” founder and chief executive Sir Peter Beck said in the results statement.
Guidance for the September quarter points to another record, with revenue forecast at US$250 million to US$265 million. The company also told the market to expect the adjusted loss to widen to somewhere between US$17 million and US$23 million as spending on its bigger rocket ramps up, and for reported gross margin to fall back to between 29 and 31 percent.
That combination, record sales alongside a deeper loss and a thinner margin, is what the market reacted to. Rocket Lab shares fell 3.4 percent in regular trading on Monday to close at US$80.04, then dropped a further 6.8 percent in after hours trade to about US$74.60. The stock is listed on the Nasdaq in New York, not on the NZX, so New Zealand investors reach it through offshore brokers and managed funds rather than through the local market.
Hanging over the result is the largest deal the company has attempted. On 29 June Rocket Lab announced an agreement to acquire the American satellite communications operator Iridium for US$54 a share in cash and stock, valuing the target at an enterprise value of about US$8 billion. Iridium runs a constellation of 66 satellites in low Earth orbit carrying voice and data traffic for shipping, aviation, defence and remote industry. Rocket Lab expects the purchase to close in the middle of next year, subject to Iridium shareholder approval and regulatory clearances, so nothing about it is settled yet.
The logic Beck has given for the deal is that building and launching rockets is the low margin end of the industry and operating the satellites is where the recurring money sits. “The most successful space companies will be the ones that have the keys to space, i.e., can build and launch their own satellites,” he told analysts on the earnings call. Two smaller acquisitions, the laser communications firm Mynaric and the spacecraft components maker Motiv, closed during the quarter and are part of the same push toward owning more of the supply chain. They also help explain the loss, since acquisition costs land on the bottom line well before any revenue does.
The other spending line is Neutron, the medium lift rocket that is meant to take Rocket Lab into a class of launch it cannot currently reach with Electron. The company said production of the first stage tank is tracking to deliver the rocket to the launch pad in the final quarter of this year, which would leave a first flight some time after that. Neutron will fly from Wallops Island in Virginia rather than from New Zealand. Beck argued the wait is worth it because the industry has nowhere near enough capacity, saying launch “has never been so constrained” and that Neutron “is going to help unblock the industry’s bottleneck”.
For New Zealand the more relevant number is the one that did not make the headlines. Electron rockets are still built in Auckland, the company’s mission control is in Auckland, and Launch Complex 1 on the Mahia Peninsula in Hawke’s Bay remains the busiest of its launch sites. On 6 August Rocket Lab flew its 13th Electron of the year from Mahia, carrying a radar imaging satellite for the Japanese operator iQPS, and it was the 92nd Electron flight overall. The company launched 21 times in 2025, and this year’s pace is running ahead of that.
Rocket Lab has been headquartered in Long Beach, California since it redomiciled to the United States, and the growth areas it is now buying into are almost entirely offshore. What stays here is manufacturing, engineering and launch operations, and those feed a sector that has grown quickly. The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s most recent sector report put the contribution of space to the New Zealand economy at about $2.5 billion in the 2023 and 2024 financial year, supporting roughly 17,000 full time equivalent jobs, up from about 12,000 in 2019.
The question the September quarter will start to answer is whether the order book converts. A backlog of US$2.36 billion is only worth what the company can actually deliver, and the two things that would turn revenue growth into profit, a working Neutron and a satellite network throwing off subscription revenue, are both still ahead of it. RNZ also reported the result on Tuesday.
Do you think Rocket Lab will ever turn a profit, and does it matter to New Zealand either way now that the company is American owned and listed. Leave a comment below and tell us what you think.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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