Apex is branching into the Japanese market, with a new contract announced this morning.
Under the contract, the Japanese NEC Corporation will buy one of Apex’s Aries satellite buses for a communications demo mission next year.
“In today’s rapidly expanding space sector, speed directly correlates with project success,” Yasushi Yokoyama, GM of NEC’s satellite constellation department, said in a statement. “By fusing NEC’s long-standing expertise in advanced mission payload design with Apex’s standardized, innovative platform, we will redefine the speed of development.”
The demo: NEC is a tech firm working on everything from AI to cyber to telecom. Its 2027 demo will focus on the latter sector of its business, which has flown missions as far back as the 1970s to test inter-sat laser links and experimental comms systems.
The company’s mission with Apex will fly a next-gen optical comms mission in LEO, in the hopes of improving tech for satcomm and networking.
The market: Apex, which announced $400M in venture capital raised in 2025, is all in on going global. The satellite bus manufacturer announced an MOU in December to establish a model to mass-produce satellites in Europe, as it aims to meet the demand for large sat constellations. Apex CEO Ian Cinnamon also told Payload that the company has done a number of international deals, but couldn’t share specific companies or countries due to customer requests.
The NEC contract, however, represents Apex’s first foray into Japan—a high-tech nation with a robust commercial space sector.
“There was a natural synergy with a lot of the work going on in Japan,” Cinnamon said, highlighting the nation’s increasing investment in space and defense and NEC’s move-fast philosophy.
What’s next: Cinnamon declined to share which regions Apex has plans to tap into, but said all of the company’s international work will share a few common threads.
“We try to focus our energies on areas where there are customers that really believe in the proliferation of space…and they’re a strong ally of the US,” he said. “If you find that overlap of those two, that tends to be where we spend the most of our energy and time.”
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The upgrades will improve the performance of the nozzle and solid rocket boosters. The company was already planning the modifications before ULA suffered an anomaly with its Vulcan booster during a February mission for the Space Force.
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