On Monday Avio sent the market two announcements a few minutes apart. One covers changes to the board and management, the other the launch of a share buyback programme. Taken separately, they read like corporate routine, the kind of text only lawyers and analysts bother with. Together, though, they tell a fairly clear story about where the Italian company is heading, after a year in which it turned from a maker of Vega rockets into an American defence project with a European passport.
The buyback: €15m for 1% of the company
Let's start with the money. The board has launched a programme to buy back up to 500,648 shares, equal to 1% of the capital after the increase linked to Advent's entry. At the 2 October closing price of €29.18, that comes to around €15m. Purchases will be carried out by Equita SIM, which will decide entirely on its own when to buy, and the shareholder authorisation runs until 8 March 2028. Avio already holds 626,929 treasury shares, or 1.25% of its capital.
Officially, there are four aims:
-> to make efficient use of operating cash flow
-> to give shareholders another way to sell
-> to use the shares as currency in transactions
-> to cover future incentive schemes for managers and employees.
The third and fourth aims are more interesting than they look (we'll come back to them).
Two numbers put the programme in perspective. The first is scale: €15m is more than Avio's entire 2025 net profit of €11.6m. The company can only afford it because, after last November's share issue, it has net cash of around €590m, earmarked mainly for the Virginia plant. The second is price. Advent paid €33.40 a share in July, and the deal closed on 24 September, yet the market now values the same share about 13% lower. When management starts buying back stock below the price at which one of Europe's biggest private equity funds has just come in, the message is fairly transparent: we think we're undervalued. One small detail I found amusing: Equita, the broker executing the purchases, has a €45 target price on the stock.
Who is leaving the board
Spain's Elena Pisonero has sat on Avio's board since June 2019 as an independent director and chaired the nomination and remuneration committee. She resigned on 29 July, effective from the 8 September shareholders' meeting. Her CV is impressive: former Spanish secretary of state for trade, ambassador to the OECD and chair of satellite operator Hispasat from 2012 to 2019. For a company whose main customers are ESA and governments, someone like that brings contacts money can't buy. With her departure the board loses its only member with experience of running a satellite operator, and with it a view of the space business from the customer's side.
Who is coming in
In her place the board has co-opted Giulia De Martino as a non-executive, independent director. She will serve until the next shareholders' meeting and joins the nomination committee. Her profile is quite different. She is a chartered accountant and auditor in practice since 2002, specialising in advice on mergers, restructurings, capital increases and company valuations. She holds a doctorate in business economics with a thesis on precisely the accounting for business combinations under IFRS 3, and has served or serves as an auditor at Saipem, TIM, units of Eni and Autostrade per l'Italia. She is no stranger to the group either: she has been an auditor at Servizi Colleferro, an Avio subsidiary, sits on the board of Italy's civil aviation authority ENAC, and in March was on the slate for Avio's own board of statutory auditors.
If you are looking for a link to the buyback, here it is. Someone whose professional speciality is deals, mergers and valuations joins the board on the very day the company formally gives itself the option to pay in shares for acquisitions. I'm not saying Avio is preparing a purchase. But it is the kind of coincidence worth noting.
The nomination committee will now be chaired by Steven Wood, founder of New York fund GreenWood Investors and an independent director at Leonardo, one of Avio's historical shareholders. So the committee that sets managers' pay and bonuses is now led by an investor rather than a former statesman. Given that the bought-back shares may also go to incentive schemes, the change looks fairly logical.
Management: the finance chief gets more power
The change in executive management is even more telling. Chief financial officer Roberto Carassai, who took the job in October 2025, is now also deputy general manager for corporate affairs. Reporting to him are legal, compliance, IT, sales and procurement management, and general services, and he keeps responsibility for investor relations. His career has been almost entirely as CFO of large Italian industrial groups: Italiana Petroli, ITA Airways, Ansaldo Energia, Trevi, Ansaldo STS and Thales Alenia Space Italia. That last one is interesting, because it means he has already run the finances of a space company.
Why does this matter? Because Avio is simultaneously running rockets in Europe, a plant of more than 900,000 sq ft in Virginia, contracts with Raytheon and Lockheed, and a new private shareholder. A company with that many moving parts needs someone who keeps contracts, procurement and money in one place. My impression is that Carassai increasingly looks like the operational right hand of chief executive Giulio Ranzo, while chairman Roberto Italia has, since July, handled international relations and above all the American market.
The new head of programmes: the man who brought Vega C back
From 16 October, Claudio Milana becomes chief programmes officer, replacing Marco Biagioni. Biagioni is an engineer with a master's in nuclear engineering who worked at Europropulsion in France, later sitting on Europropulsion's board and serving as chief executive of Regulus. In other words, someone with deep experience in solid-propellant motors and production.
Milana has been with the group for close to 25 years. He joined ELV (now Spacelab) in 2002 and worked his way through engines, launcher development and strategic programme management, with key roles on Vega, Vega C, Vega E and Space Rider. The most important line on his CV is that he led the task force that returned Vega C to flight after the VV22 failure, and more recently the one for the STS cryogenic system flight demonstrator.
Looking back, Vega C's return to flight slipped by around a year after the failed Zefiro 40 test. But once the new deadline was set in March 2024, the company kept its word and the rocket flew at the end of 2024. Since then Vega C has flown five successful missions in a row. Someone who was at the centre of that story is a sensible choice for the next stage: Vega E with its methane upper stage, promised for 2027–2028.
| Role | Outgoing | Incoming | Background |
|---|---|---|---|
| Independent director | Elena Pisonero | Giulia De Martino | Auditor, M&A and valuation specialist (IFRS 3) |
| Chair, Nomination & Remuneration Committee | Elena Pisonero | Steven Wood | Investor, GreenWood founder, Leonardo director |
| Deputy General Manager Corporate | new role | Roberto Carassai | CFO, ex-ITA Airways, Ansaldo, Thales Alenia Space Italia |
| Chief Programs Officer | Marco Biagioni | Claudio Milana | 25 years at the group, led Vega C return to flight |
What it all adds up to
Taken together, the two announcements sketch a company getting ready to manage money, not just rockets. The board is becoming more financial (an auditor and an investor instead of a former satellite-operator chair), executive power is concentrating around the CFO, and programmes are passing to an engineer who has proved he can fix a crisis. The buyback, meanwhile, gives management a tool to support the share price, reward managers and, should a suitable target appear, pay in stock.
I would watch two things. Whether share-funded deals appear in the coming months, and whether Avio buys back actively or the programme stays symbolic, as so often happens in Italy. If Equita starts buying serious volumes below €30, that will be a stronger signal than any press release.