KVH Industries, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the KVH Industries third quarter 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Anthony Pike, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Andrea. Good morning, everyone. And thank you for joining us today for KVH Industries third quarter results, which are included in the earnings release we published earlier this morning. Joining me on the call is the company's Chief Executive Officer, Brent Bruin. Before I get into the numbers, a few standard statements. Firstly, if you would like a copy of the earnings release or if you would like to listen to a recording of today's call, both will be available on our website. And if you are listening via the web, please feel free to submit questions to iratkvh.com. Further, this conference call will contain certain forward-looking statements that are subject to numerous assumptions and uncertainties that may cause our actual results to differ materially from those expressed in these statements. We undertake no obligation to update or revise any of these statements. We will also discuss adjusted EBITDA, which is a non-GAAP financial measure. You will find a definition of this measure in our press release as well as a reconciliation to comparable GAAP numbers. We encourage you to review the cautionary statements made in our SEC filings, specifically those under the heading risk factors in our Q3 2024 Form 10Q, which will be filed later today. The company's other SEC filings are available directly from the investor information section of our website. Now, to walk you through the highlights of our third quarter, I'll turn the call over to Brent.

Thank you, Anthony, and good morning, everyone. Let me begin with a high-level overview of our results. Third quarter airtime in service revenue was $24.4 million, down $5 million from the third quarter of 2023. Airtime gross margins declined slightly versus the same period last year due to a shift in our subscriber base. However, airtime margins increased sequentially versus the second quarter. The improvement in margins is driven by substantial contribution from Starlink data subscriptions, now sold through our bulk data purchase agreement, which went into effect on July 1st. Total revenue for the quarter was $28.9 million, roughly a 13% decrease from a year earlier. This was due to the continuing decline in VSAT product sales and corresponding VSAT service revenue. These results are in line with the expectations we shared last quarter. Our new product and service initiatives continue to help us build positive momentum. We increased our subscribing vessel count for the second consecutive quarter. We also shipped a record number of communication antennas for the third consecutive quarter, driven by a substantial increase in Starlink terminals and continued demand for our VSAT units. In addition, we increased shipments of our ComBox Edge communications gateway for the second consecutive quarter. As we discussed in last quarter's call, activation of Starlink and VSAT terminals, as well as ComBox Edge units, tend to carry over into the next quarter, building a backlog of potential activations and establishing a robust leading indicator for future airtime and service subscription growth. Starlink is an exciting part of our multi-channel portfolio, offering outstanding communications to commercial and leisure subscribers worldwide. We continue to see strong demand for mobile priority data service that we have been offering to commercial and leisure vessels, having now activated more than 1,500 terminals since the start of the year. We are now expanding beyond the maritime market with the addition of priority plans for stationary use. We have commenced Starlink's high-speed, low-requested service for land-based applications in the United States, Colombia, and Argentina, and may expand the service offering to other countries. The land-based Starlink plans are ideal for seamless, high-speed connectivity for stationary solutions, in particular in areas unsupported by terrestrial communications. Potential applications include education, community Wi-Fi, remote commercial operations, construction, agriculture, disaster relief, and healthcare. With these new plans are supported by all the Starlink terminals currently in our portfolio and our ComBox Edge communications gateway. We also introduced several new services in the third quarter. MailLink Plus is our next-generation maritime email connectivity platform designed for easy installation on any compatible Windows-based computer. MailLink Plus supports operational communications and enables users to stay connected with others on board via email, even when satellite or cellular connectivity is unavailable. In addition, we expanded delivery options for our award-winning KVH Link service with an -the-air unicast delivery option for the Link Hub media server. The -the-air service enables vessels equipped with Link Hub to receive daily news, sports, and entertainment updates of virtually any onboard network, including VSAT, Starlink, OneWeb, or 5G cellular. Along with these changes, we continue to move forward on the development of additional new services. We will officially be rolling out our OneWeb service later this quarter, which follows a series of tests on vessels around the world. We also expect to expand the cybersecurity and crew captive portal capabilities of ComBox Edge in coming months. During Q3 and in recent weeks, we also responded to several events, both planned and not. First, as expected, the US Coast Guard scaled back its airtime and VSAT terminal deployments as part of their annual renewal. We're including its anticipated reduction in our updated guidance. Secondly, on October 19th, the IS-33E satellite operated by Intelsat experienced an anomaly that resulted in loss of service in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Indian Ocean. Following the disruption of IS-33E, we rapidly restored service for the vast majority of our customers thanks to our multi-layered HTS network. We moved customers to alternative satellites and adjusted data prioritization on those beams. We're now working with Intelsat and Skype Earth JSAT to add capacity and to optimize network performance for our customers. I'm tremendously proud of the performance initiative and creativity shown by our network engineers and tech support teams in responding to this issue and minimizing any disruption to our customers in the region. KVH, together with the rest of the maritime industry, continues to adapt to significant technological disruptions, and we continue to feel the impact of these changes. However, we have reacted decisively to this fundamental shift by expanding our portfolio of new technology, delivering the products and services our customers desire, and making decisions necessary to reconfigure our business operations. As a result, our hybrid LEO-GEO deployments are increasing. We are meeting the demands for leisure boaters and commercial fleets for LEO technology and sophisticated value-added services, and we are establishing a solid pipeline for ongoing growth in service activations. Challenges remain, but I believe we have laid out a path toward growth and profitability. Now I'd like to hand it back to Anthony for a more detailed look at the numbers.

Thank you, Brent. As a reminder, I would like to know that similar to our call for Q2, I will not restate data that is in the earnings release or clearly described in our 10-Q. I will focus my comments on information that either elaborates on or clarifies the published data. So with respect to our third quarter financial results, airtime gross margin, which is not reported in our earnings release, was 36.5%, which is up compared to the prior quarter gross margin of 36.0%. As Brent mentioned, this increase can be mainly attributed to strong margins from LEO airtime following the signing of a bulk data distribution agreement with Starlink at the end of Q2. However, we do anticipate that airtime margins may compress slightly over time following the introduction of custom Starlink data plans, which offer new options for fleet operators and boaters to select the plan most suitable for each vessel and budget. Total subscribing vessels at the end of Q3 were just below 6,800, which is approximately 2% up from the prior quarter. Reported Q3 gross profit was negative 0.2 million as compared to a negative 0.7 million in Q3 of last year. And Q3 operating expenses of 11.3 million include a 1.1 million impairment charge related to the reclassification of our US manufacturing facility. So as is held for sale following the manufacturing wind down previously announced on February 13. Q3 operating expenses excluding this impairment charge were down around 0.8 million or 8% from the prior quarter and 1.8 million or 14% from the first quarter of 2024 on a like for like basis. Our adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was 2.9 million and our earnings release has usual reconciliation of that. Capital expenditures for the quarter were 1.5 million and so adjusted EBITDA less capex was 1.4 million. This compares to adjusted EBITDA less capex of zero in the second quarter with adjusted EBITDA of 2.6 million less capex of also 2.6 million. Our ending cash balance of $49.8 million was up approximately half a million from the beginning of the quarter. And finally, we are narrowing our guidance for the full year 2024 to a range of approximately $114 to $117 million for revenue and 8.5 to $11.5 million for adjusted EBITDA. These changes are due to the value and timing of the US Coast Guard contractual reductions which differed slightly to what we have anticipated as well as the general pressure on ARPUs despite stronger than expected margins. So this concludes our prepared remarks and I will now turn the call over to the operator to open the line for the Q&A portion of this morning's call. Operator.

Thank you. At this time we will conduct the question and answer session. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster.

First

question comes from Chris Quilty with Quilty Space. Please go ahead.

Thanks, gentlemen. Just wanted to follow up on what you're seeing in terms of vessel count and vessel growth and sort of the shift between Starlink and the VSAT units. I noticed you did have a press release out yesterday or a couple of days ago that seemed to highlight the bundling strategy, but can you give us a sense, I mean, we've got the total vote count, but it looks like you're still adding, you know, net hundreds of Starlink units and shedding hundreds of VSAT units. Is that an accurate assessment?

Well, I'll let you, hey Chris, it's Brent. I'll let Anthony get into the more details with regard to the numbers, but using the word shedding VSAT units isn't necessarily accurate. We're activating many standalone Starlinks. We're also activating quite a few, from a commercial perspective, more than half of our Starlink terminals are being bundled with the onboard VSAT or a new VSAT for that matter. So as I said in my remarks, we continue to ship VSATs. They just tend to be currently in tandem with the Starlink terminals. So yes, standalone VSATs are contracting, but that contraction from a standalone perspective, many of those have shifted to be a hybrid with VSAT and Starlink, and then of course, we have standalone Starlinks as well.

Right, and you didn't

change

the way you report, so it's now by vessel and now by terminal, correct?

That's correct. We used to do it by terminal, and the fact of the matter is, it was from a materiality perspective, the same as number of vessels. We had just a handful of vessels that carried two terminals onboard to VSAT, but now that we are seeing so many vessels with both a Starlink and a VSAT, we thought it would be prudent, and especially from a materiality perspective, with the installed base to just count vessels.

Yeah, and we're still seeing, I think we, sorry Chris, I think we disclosed previously on a call the trend of around half of Starlink units going out, being shipped out, being accompanied, or being added to a Geo vessel, and that trend has continued.

Gotcha, and on those units, or I should say, with regard to Starlink, I mean, where do you see the pipeline relative to where you started at the beginning of the year? Is it continuing to grow, and do you see this, the Starlink product, as expanding the size of the pie, rather than simply taking market share from traditional Geo solutions?

Yes, to answer concisely. As I indicated, we shipped a record number of terminals this past quarter, so sequentially the terminal shipments were up from the second quarter, so we have a robust pipeline. Secondly, due to the cost of the Starlink terminal, as well as cost per bit perspective, the very low price for the connectivity, we're seeing an expansion as far as the number of vessels that it could potentially sell services to.

Gotcha, and do you need to change anything in your distribution, given the changing nature of the subscriber base, or do you feel like your current channels are properly reaching potential subscribers that weren't traditionally in your target zone?

The short answer is we have a very robust channel, but we're always adjusting the channel, if you will, more adding, more service partners as opposed to reducing, but we do remove them as well, and it's an ongoing exercise, and it probably has increased a bit with the Starlink introduction. And we're going into land as well, which is obviously a new market for us as far as stabilized solutions via Starlink, and we're doing that in the more remote parts of the world, like I talked about on the call with Argentina and Colombia, and remote parts of the US, and we very well may expand to other regions. We have a sales team located in Africa, we're only service providers, and we're looking at opportunities there as well.

And what prodded the move to look at the land market, which as you mentioned is not a traditional target for KVH?

Well, it prodded the fact that we were able to easily get into the market using Starlink, the fact that we have an established presence in these regions, that we have an internal processes as far as activation and billing already in place, is basically an adjacent market, which is very easy to step into.

Great. Also, just to follow up, I mean, we see the prepay that popped up from the pre-commitment on Starlink. How should we think about the runoff of that? I think you had mentioned previously that it covers two years or more. No,

we previously said more than a year, and we're not being overly exact, but I would anticipate seeing a good portion of that running off in 2025, if not all of it.

Gotcha. And Anthony, it looks like the inventories have actually trended up since the start of the year. Can you explain that phenomenon?

Yeah, sure. So I think as we announced in Q1, we're working on this final build out, and part of that is to bring in all the remaining raw materials required. We have a smaller team in the facility, and so actually the physical build out process will take a little bit longer, and we'll be building product through next year. But really, the increase has been where we've been bringing the raw materials in primarily, and the increase this quarter, for example, of 2.5 million, we brought in the vast majority of those build out materials, but also the Starlink inventory is up just short of two million quarter on quarter, so that really accounts for the entire increase, really.

Gotcha, and likewise on the OPEC side, this was sort of a record low R&D in the quarter, albeit you've shed businesses that were previously contributing to that total. Is this a sort of a roundabout good quarterly run rate, or when you look out maybe into the next year or two, do you see the need for major R&D investments, and presumably they would be more on the software side than where traditionally they would be on hardware? Is that a fair assumption?

We have an appropriately sized R&D team, so I wouldn't see adding to that. We have applications engineers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, software engineers, we have our bases covered. So I would not anticipate any increase in R&D spend, and the run rate of what was approximately $10 million. Yeah,

when you strip out the impairment, $10 million is pretty much where we're at.

Yeah, we're focused on trying to find yet a bit more improvement there.

Right, and maybe final question, you mentioned that OneWeb is finally coming online for you. How has the pipeline moved for you in the last, say, three to six months on that product, and can you maybe just talk high level around how you're positioning it with customers relative to Starlink?

Well, it's early days, first and foremost. It won't necessarily be positioned against Starlink. We talk about a hybrid service offering, and right now we're focused on doing Starlink with VSEP, but that doesn't mean that we couldn't have redundancy and alternative fast onboarding network with a OneWeb and a Starlink solution. You know, it's been a little slow out of the gate from a OneWeb perspective, getting the service going. So, until we're not, we haven't really established significant penetration in pipeline just yet because we've been waiting to get the service launched. We'll share more of that in the year end call.

Great, and I guess I forgot to say, but congrats on the results here. It looks like you guys have executed the turn with a pretty bold shift in business strategy, so keep up the good work.

Thank you for saying so, Chris.

Thank you. I'm showing no further questions at this time. Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This concludes the program. You may now disconnect.