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spk03: Good day, everyone. Welcome to Viasat's FY24 Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call. Your host for today is Mark Dankberg, Chairman and CEO. You may proceed, Mr. Dankberg.
spk07: Thanks. Good afternoon, everybody, and thanks for joining us today. So with me, I've got Guru Gorapan, our President, Sean Duffy, our Chief Financial Officer, and Robert Blair, our General Counsel. So, Robert, could you please start us with our Safe Harbor Disclosure?
spk04: Sure, Mark. As you know, this discussion will contain forward-looking statements. This is a reminder that factors could cause actual results to differ materially. Additional information concerning these factors is contained in our SEC filings, including our most recent reports on Forms 10-K and 10-Q. Copies are available from the SEC or from our website. Back to you, Mark.
spk07: Okay, thanks. So, we encourage reading the shareholder letter that we posted to our website earlier this afternoon for more details. I'll start with an overview of the main points, and then we'll allow time for questions. Our main objective today is to bring you up to date, organize some information, and provide clarity on our plans. So I'll start with a quick update on performance in the quarter, which was really good. Overall, up well into double digits on revenue and adjusted EBITDA on a combined operating basis. I'll give an update on the status of the two satellite anomalies, lay out the financial implications of putting those behind us, and describe the go-forward plan. And then I'll give a quick reminder of our overall strategy and why we're well-positioned for growth, primarily in the $108 billion market for commercial and government global mobility. So, and after that, Guru will go into more depth on the quarter with business highlights and financial results, give a little bit more color on the Inmarsat integration, and give an update on our fiscal year 24 and 25 growth outlook. Just for context, at the beginning, we have a good track record of identifying and building profitable and enduring positions in a succession of specific, somewhat esoteric market segments, including against much larger competitors. I think the sale of the tactical data links business earlier this year to a leading aerospace and defense company About $2 billion, it's indicative of our ability to build long-term value while also transforming target market segments. We've been targeting global mobile broadband for over a decade, and we've had a big impact on the commercial and flight connectivity market in the U.S. We aim to leverage our technology and domain knowledge and the extensive operational data that we've accumulated along with Inmarsat's heritage to lead specific segments of this rapidly growing market for commercial and government global mobile. We can do it by focusing on quantitative performance metrics that are critical to our customers and bringing together the assets, skills, and ecosystems needed to win on those metrics. Our financial performance in the second quarter demonstrates strength in global mobility. Core operating financial results were good across the business, both at Viasat and Legacy in Marsat. Excluding the one-time benefit of a legal settlement, operating revenue is up 16% year-over-year on a combined basis. And then excluding that one-time mitigation benefit and the satellite impairment charges, operating adjusted EBITDA was up 20%. Our aviation business continues steady growth. Our customers' fleet of planes is up to 3,350 and still growing. Passenger engagement is growing. and we've got a robust pipeline of new orders. Information assurance products for secure government data centers and antenna systems are also growing very well. Maritime is growing modestly, and we see opportunities to build momentum there. Our outlook is also quite good. We anticipate continued growth in revenue and adjusted EBITDA during fiscal year 24 and fiscal year 25, and to reach free cash flow positives in the first half of calendar 25. So going to the satellite anomalies, those on Viasat 3, Flight 1, and Inmarsat 6, Flight 2 this summer were two totally different events. They were setbacks, but we have plans to deal with each. The I6F2 will result in a total write-off, a claim for about $349 million will be submitted to insurers shortly. I6F2's near-term contribution to revenue was expected to be small. It was part of a longer-term planned evolution of Inmarsat's redundant global L-band coverage to a newer generation of satellites. We have a provision in our updated capital budget to replace that mission of I6F2 in a timely manner. BISAT-3 Flight 1 is impaired, and as we disclosed recently, we expect it will have less than 10% of nominal total throughput. We expect to file an insurance claim this calendar year for about $421 million. The anomaly affected what's called a feeder link antenna. The rest of the satellite has operated nominally or better to date. Our focus has been on characterizing the affected antenna so we can compensate for the anomaly optimally. We've made a lot of progress there. The satellite system is software-defined on the ground, which gives us a lot more tools that we can use. We can use them to optimize available throughput for global mobility, especially by dynamically steering coverage beams on moving airplanes and ships and to the busiest airports, seaports, or wherever there's instantaneous demand is greatest. We also can effectively increase the capacity of our other satellites in our fleet for global mobility by the way we use each of the Viasat-3s, including Flight 1. Our fixed U.S. business, though, depends more on the volume of bandwidth than on dynamic beam steering, so we expect it will decline until we launch and position the next Viasat-3. We expect to grow in fiscal 24 and fiscal 25, nonetheless. driven by the backlog and outlook in global mobility and government. BISAT-3, Flight 3, has a launch contract now for the fourth quarter of Calendar 24, about a year from now. Either BISAT-3, Flight 2, or Flight 3 would replace Flight 1 over the Americas, and then Flight 1 would be relocated. A report on the Flight 1 antennae root cause, and then the corrective actions for flight two from the antenna manufacturer is planned for next week. The flight two satellite is awaiting corrective actions to the effective antenna and then integration with the completed spacecraft. So we'll give an update on that schedule next quarter. The other satellite update is that we don't anticipate additional material investment in Viasat 4. and we've written down that asset. It was designed prior to the ADVARSAT acquisition when fixed services were a higher priority. Given the timing on the Viasat 3s and our focus on mobility, its need date is farther out than originally planned, so deferring capital investment now saves several hundreds of millions of dollars in the near term. It accelerates our free cash flow generation, and it improves profitability.
spk11: We've
spk07: We expect that key technology work that was performed on Biosaf4 will apply to a future broadband satellite that will deliver better returns in mobility applications. The end result is a write-off of the three satellite assets of about $900 million net of insurance. The schedule for Flight 1, remember the build schedule for Flight 1 was much longer than for Flight 2 or 3 due to both COVID issues and learning curve. So its cost was higher than the others. The bulk of the write-off is due to Bison 3 Flight 1, I-6 Flight 2, about $350 million of capitalized interest. I'll just briefly touch on our strategy before we go to Guru. And just to be sure, our strategy is to lead specific government, commercial, global mobility market segments that have common characteristics that drive value creation for our customers and for us. So we're looking for broadband customers whose connectivity is directly coupled to operational needs or wants, and where customers are motivated to understand and measure the quality of connectivity that they need for those purposes. And we're looking for customers that want contractual assurance they get the connectivity they need for their missions, over all the times and places their platforms travel. So that means measuring the times and places where connectivity is most stressed, those congestion hotspots that can undermine achieving their operational purposes. We can attract and serve those customers by meeting specific, granular, service-level commitments, and then giving them the data and insight they need to optimize their own financial performance. We think that describes a large and growing portion of the global mobile market. Our success in in-flight connectivity is the outcome of applying that strategy over a journey of discovery that we've taken with our airline customers. First, quantifying the demand elasticity and value creation for different forms of in-flight Wi-Fi service offerings, and then measuring highly concentrated demand at peak times at busy airports that comes with high passenger engagement and where other services haven't really performed reliably. And then finally, As good connectivity becomes more widely available across airlines and routes, it becomes critical to each airline to both differentiate their brand and their value propositions from other airlines, while also capturing the value that's created by that connectivity. So we can apply these points to multiple market segments. Once a few customers understand the significance of connectivity measurements over entire routes and the hotspot challenges, and then translate that into competitive advantage, it tends to drive change across entire market segments. The dynamic global coverage and beam steering of the Viasat 3 constellation, even with an impaired Flight 1, as well as the capabilities of the upcoming GX789 series support our strategy. So this continues to resonate with customers, and it's resulting in new business globally, including some examples this quarter, such as Korean Air, Malaysian Airlines, Atlantic Offshore, Porter Airlines, and with the U.S. Space Force and more. The other important element of our strategy is to better leverage Inmarsat's global L-band leadership. L-band is very well suited to low-cost, highly reliable, weather-resilient coverage for emergency voice and operational data, and there's growing opportunity to integrate both satellite and terrestrial coverage for Internet of Things and mainstream platforms mobile devices. There's already substantial overlap in the customer base between our broadband and L-band markets, and there's good opportunity to further differentiate our integrated service offerings. So our near-term growth outlook is good, and longer-term is even more exciting. As part of our comprehensive review upon closing the InMarsat acquisition, we're refining our strategy to make sure we're focused on the right market segments and refining value propositions that resonate with customers. And as we complete and deploy the capital investments to take those value propositions global, that we generate the cash flow we're aiming for. We're planning an investor day in March of 2024, where we'll go into more depth on the analytics and the customer journeys that I'm describing that underpin our approach. So now, I'll hand it over to Guru, who'll talk about our second quarter.
spk06: Great. Thanks, Mark. I will cover three key topics today, our Q2 financial performance, integration and transformation, and an update on our combined outlook. We are executing on our strategy and delivered a strong core financial and operational performance during Q2. Core revenue and adjusted EBITDA both grew by double digits year over year, driven by our government, aviation, and maritime businesses. Legacy Inmarsat and Viasat both performed well with strong contributions. Some of the key highlights from the quarter include government systems had another quarter of strong demand for our information assurance encryption products, which drove product revenue up 50% year over year. And during the quarter, we were awarded a proliferated LEO satellite-based services contract by the U.S. Space Force as part of their 900 million IDIQ program. Services will be comprised of our current and future satellite constellation capabilities, as well as a partner, LEO-MEO Networks, to deliver integrated multi-orbit solutions that may include space relay services. Next, UK National Cybersecurity Center Evaluator, our next generation data test cryptography solid state drive for top secret classification, which was successful, and we are only hardware encrypted SSD using the industry standard interface and form factor to attain the status. Recent trends in satellite services continued with strong growth in commercial IFC, which ended the quarter with 3,350 aircraft in service, up 19% year over year on a combined basis. And 1,600 aircraft in backlog. U.S. fixed broadband revenue declined as fewer residential subscribers were partially offset by higher ARPU. We continue to reallocate bandwidth to support our rapid IFC growth. In addition, we announced several commercial air customer updates. As Mark mentioned earlier, Malaysia Airlines' selection of our IFE solution for its new Boeing 737-8 aircraft, Korean Air's selection of our IFC solution for its upcoming Airbus A321 new aircraft, and additional orders for both IFE and IFC solutions on Porter Airlines' new Embraer E195-E2 aircraft. Maritime revenue continued modest growth. The total KA band mobility platforms, which includes vessels and aircraft, grew to over 19,000, up about 2% sequentially. Finally, awards for the quarter were up 15% year over year to a billion dollars. Backlog was 3.6 billion at quarter end. We have a couple of one-off items in Q2. In the commercial network segment, we recognized a non-recurring benefit to product revenue of $95 million and adjusted EBITDA benefit of $86 million as a result of litigation settlement. In the prior year period, we recorded revenue of $56 million and adjusted EBITDA of $51 million related to the same litigation. We also announced $900 million of net asset impairment charges primarily related to the previously announced satellite anomalies which includes approximately $350 million of capitalized interest. Now, some color on the financials. Q2 FY 2024 revenue was $1.2 billion. This was up 85 percent compared to revenue from continuing operations of $664 million in Q2 FY 2023. Including the non-recurring litigation benefit from both years and including INMARSAT in both years, Q2 2024 revenue was up 16 percent year over year. Net loss totaled $767 million for fiscal Q2, which increased from $48 million net loss in the year-ago period, primarily due to net asset impairment charges related to satellite anomalies. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $486 million, an increase of 210% year-over-year from continuing operations. Excluding the non-recurring litigation benefit from both years, asset impairment charges, and including INMARSAT in both years, Q2 FY 2024, adjusted EBITDA was up 20% year-over-year. Sequentially, net leverage decreased to approximately 3.7 times estimated combined last 12 months adjusted EBITDA as of Q2 FY2024, which is a 0.2 times sequential improvement and substantially favorable to the plan at the time the Inmarsat acquisition was announced. We have significant financial flexibility with more than $3 billion of liquidity, including approximately $2 billion of cash and cash equivalents on our balance sheet at quarter end and no near-term maturities. And we have a fully funded path to positive free cash flow. In addition to our solid results, we are also proud to be recognized by the U.S. government at this year's G20 Summit for our work to help close the gender digital divide and bring Internet access to women in remote areas of the world. You can find a more complete review of our results in the shareholder letter that we posted today. Overall, as you heard from Mark as well, this was an excellent quarter for YSS. Now moving to the next topic, which is integration and transformation. Our integration of Inmarsat and the transformation of our combined organization is going well and is ahead of the plan, bringing greater certainty that we will deliver and exceed our synergy goals for the Inmarsat acquisition. Last week, we took the required labor actions to achieve annual operating expense savings of approximately $100 million beginning fiscal year 2025, which positions the company for improved profitability going forward. This timeline represents a multiyear acceleration relative to our targets. Separately, the benefit to capital expenditures was included in our FY25 guidance of $1.4 billion to $1.5 billion announced last month. We expect to incur $45 million of one-time costs related to these actions. As financial discipline remains a top priority, we are working every opportunity to improve our cost structure and operational efficiency, including taking a closer look at our third-party procurement spend, more disciplined capital expenditure, and benchmarking to accelerate the timing and magnitude of free cash flow. Now, transitioning to outlook. I'll wrap up with a high-level summary of our financial outlook. We are excluding satellite impairment charges, and the non-recurring benefit from the litigation settlement announced today from our guidance. For FY 2024, we expect revenue growth in the high single-digit percentages over FY 2023 for the combined company, with revenue growing to a range of $4.1 billion to $4.25 billion. For FY 2024, we expect adjusted EBITDA growth in the mid-single-digit percentages over FY 2023 for the combined company. We expect FY 2024 adjusted EBITDA to grow to a range of $1.25 billion to $1.3 billion. In FY 2025, we continue to expect both revenue and adjusted EBITDA to grow. FY 2024 capital expenditures are expected to be approximately $1.7 billion, then decline in FY 2025 to a range of $1.4 billion to $1.5 billion, inclusive of a placeholder for the potential funding of an I-6F2 replacement. Capital expenditure guidance does not include the expected $770 million benefit from insurance recoveries. Note that we include capitalized interest in our CAPEX guidance. Our path to positive free cash flow in the first half of calendar year 2025 is driven by sourcing growth from our large and growing markets, which includes government, aviation, and maritime, realizing realization of our sizable backlogs, meaningful cost rationalization, and a disciplined CapEx spending, which benefits from the natural decline as we launch our satellites. We are driving cost structure improvements with synergies, scale, and benchmarking. And the magnitude of free cash flow is expected to increase meaningfully as we place YSAT-3 F2 and F3 satellites into service. So there you have it. You know, while we've had unfortunate satellite setbacks, we have a very good hand, and we are optimizing and growing the strong assets we have. Our operational performance in Q2 was excellent, and we are on track to achieve very material synergy value, then expect the combined company to grow revenue and adjust to the bid-die in FY24 and FY25, while creating a powerful global mobility and government business. And to be clear, our FY25 growth is based on a full 12 months of Inmarsat in FY24. With that, I'll pass it back to Mark.
spk07: Okay, thanks Guru. And with that, I think we'll open it up for questions.
spk03: Thank you. And ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. We'll take the first question from Phil Cusick, JP Morgan.
spk05: Hi, thank you. I guess a couple if I can. First, was the decision to move away from the FISA 4 and focus on mobility a statement on the viability of home broadband from satellite, or is that more of a just timing and capital needs? And then second, can you talk about the plans for the cash on the balance sheet and the insurance proceeds coming in? There's some debt at a discount. Does it make sense to pick off that, or do you want to have this cash on the balance sheet for a long time? Thank you.
spk07: Okay, yeah, first on the VICEK4, the, you know, we have been targeting the mobility broadband market for, you know, probably for about as long as we've been, you know, since we launched VICEK1. And, you know, it's because the customers value the services better. We're not dealing with or competing with government subsidies. And the other thing, now that that's really come to light, especially, you know, in our experience in flight and the data that we have from Inmarsat in the maritime business is that that, you know, dealing with that mobility factor and that concentration of demand, it's a really hard and tricky problem. We think we're really well suited to do that. And whereas, you know, the original design of ISAT-4 that we started really was about large bulk amounts of bandwidth at low cost, what we're really going to be leveraging is global coverage and the ability to put that demand in the same patterns as the customer's usage requires. So we feel like we can do better in that we've got seven other K-band satellites that will be launched over about the next three years. So we felt it made complete economic sense to focus on those, the mobility markets, and then bring a new broadband mobility satellite to market following those later on at the end of the decade.
spk02: And, Phil, I can hit your question on the cash, on the balance sheets. I think a couple things. One, just want to, given the credit markets, want to stay in a very good liquid position and keep that liquidity and agility on the balance sheet. I think if you think about the net carry, given the investments we've been able to make and net of the tax impacts of the interest expense, the benefits we get there is just it's not as painful to carry that flexibility. And so that's kind of a guidepost for us right now.
spk00: Thank you.
spk03: Next up, we'll hear from Mike Crawford, B. Reilly Securities.
spk09: Thank you. In commercial networks, you have this Cisco settlement off of this old jury award that you won against Acacia when its co-founder stole some coding structure and emailed it to their employees. So now you've got two settlements, but also there's this ongoing licensing and royalty requirement that I guess is going to improve ongoing commercial network EBITDA. Is there any way you can quantify what that might be or how long that might last?
spk02: Hey, Mike. You know, yeah, we do have some ongoing benefits from the agreement, but the terms of the agreement are confidential, so we can't really give you the details there. We have included the benefits we expect in the outlook, though.
spk09: Okay. Thank you, Sean. And then regarding the status of, I guess, the BISAT-3, F2, and F3 satellites, so is there – you're waiting to attach the final reflector component like how is there a way you can quantify the timing of some of these steps so we know when potentially that could be at launch let's say if you got it all clear to move ahead you know say next week
spk07: The schedule for integration of the reflector once it's delivered to Boeing is pretty clear. The thing that we're going to get more information on next week is what that lead time will be for the reflector delivery. I think we have a very good understanding of what step in the deployment process failed and how to avoid that on the next deployment. And then there's potentially even additional measures that we could use to back those up. That's what we'll find out. And we'll have that discussion. We'll think it'd be better to get the data before we speculate. For Flight 3, Flight 3 has been on the same schedule for quite a long time. I think since the last time we reported, we executed a launch contract for, and that was, that's for the Q4, which was really driven by launch vehicle availability, launch window availability. So that, that one, I think is that, you know, that one we're pretty confident in, you know, uh, then the issue will just be, if it turns out that the two satellites end up being very close together, uh, we'll, we'll figure out how to prioritize, uh, you know, how to prioritize them or the extent to which we could do them both at the same time if that were the case.
spk09: Okay. Thank you, Mark. And then just maybe two really quick ones. You mentioned Space Force mobility services. Is that something that's new, and is that something that would show up in government systems or satellite services?
spk07: That would show up in government systems, and it's – Yeah, it is new. It's new for us, and it's a little bit unique to our networking services, more networking technology and our services both.
spk09: Okay, thank you. And then the last one is just, did I hear correctly that the IP from Viasat 4, even though it was supposed to give you some kind of seven-fold increase in capacity versus, say, a Viasat 3, that there's no way to – put any of those innovations in any of these next seven K-band satellites that are launching, but first we would see what would be in a mobility satellite after that. Is that what I heard?
spk07: Yeah. So, I mean, the seven satellites that are under construction are, you know, all in very – well, at least the Biosat-3s and the GX-10s are – pretty close to completion. The GX7, 8, and 9 are also already, they're well underway. So those techniques will go into the next generation broadband one. And the main thing that we're really focused on is getting very large field of view in this dynamic beam hopping and improving not just the the raw capacity, but the capacity that we deliver overlaid on top of the demand distributions that we're seeing in these mobility markets, which we spent some time discussing on our shareholder presentation in September. But being able to match those patterns is really, really valuable. And so we think that's a better metric for value creation.
spk11: Okay, thank you very much. Thanks, Mike.
spk03: Next up, you have a question from Rick Prentice, Raymond James.
spk11: Nice. Good afternoon, everybody.
spk10: Hi, Rick. Busy afternoon, but first, appreciate the guidance kind of clarity, helping us understand growth rates, but also dollars. That really helps us. There's a lot of moving pieces here, obviously. One quick one, too. I think I heard you say that the fiscal 24 revenue guidance would exclude, let me just ask the question this way, does the revenue guidance include or exclude the litigation and the revenue? Go ahead, Sean.
spk02: That excludes the non-recurring part of that, Rick.
spk11: The growth percentage. The growth percentage, yes.
spk06: The range and the growth percentage.
spk02: Yes. So it excludes the effect of the non-recurring for Acacia.
spk10: Okay, so the dollars, go ahead.
spk02: Yeah, I was going to say, Rick, and just one thing to clarify, and the dollars only include 10 months of IMRSAT.
spk10: Yeah, whereas the percents are apples to apples, 12 month, 12 month.
spk02: For a trend, yes. Right, exactly.
spk10: Okay, good, good. Yeah, because in the shareholder letter, I picked up that the EBITDA was excluding the litigation. and so the revenue is excluded as well. Okay, cool. On growth in fiscal 25, is there any way to tease out kind of a zip code? Are we talking low single-digit, mid-single-digit, high single-digit teams? What should we think about? What does grow revenue in EBITDA in fiscal 25 mean? And that would be, I think, a 12-month over 12-month comparison also.
spk06: Yeah, Rick, we are not commenting on that at this point. I think we are. Let's get next quarter. Next quarter we'll give you more clarity.
spk07: Yeah, it'll be closer. We'll be closer to it. We'll be able to give a better range.
spk10: Okay. Okay. That helps a lot. And then piggybacking on Phil's question a little bit there, I mean, for a long time, heck, even when I was in the industry, I used to think of satellite, the best use of bandwidth, the best bang for your buck was to go after these better margin areas, we call it the game, government, aviation, maritime, and enterprise. As you think about how you're running the business, is there a different way than just lumping a lot of stuff into satellite services that might be more informed to help us understand the businesses or how you manage the business, both in financials and on metrics? Because it does feel to me like the government, aviation, maritime, and enterprise are probably the better segments to go after. But it's hard from the outside, really modeling it and understanding it.
spk02: Yeah, so I think, Rick, if I'm understanding your question, it's just how are we thinking about things looking forward with this segment. And, you know, I think one thing, you can see the service growth in our government business. So, you know, I do think you get some insights there. But, you know, I think the way that we look at the business going forward, I think that's something we're going to continue to think about as the business evolves. Okay.
spk10: And the last one for me is as we think about, again, zip code thought, fiscal 26 seems a long way away and appreciate the thought of what happens from fiscal 24 to 25 on CapEx. We get the question a lot about what is maintenance CapEx versus kind of the growth CapEx as you put satellites up there. So any way you can kind of help us start thinking about what an ongoing maintenance level is for the business and then also what 26 is actually might be in total CapEx?
spk02: You know, Rick, I think the best way to think about that is, you know, just what we've talked about is as we get the satellites into service, we're going to continue to see the CapEx kick downward. And so that's what we would expect from 25 to 26 as well. You know, our maintenance CapEx is, or maybe a better way to say it, is our satellite CapEx is the dominant part of our capital spend. And so, you know, as we finish off on those fleets, that's how you, you know, you're driving that efficiency downward, you know, going forward.
spk07: But I can add a little bit. You know, the maintenance capex, think about that. The dominant factor is the per capita subscriber bandwidth consumption, right, net of ARPU gains. That is most evident in the consumer markets. In these mobility markets, it's, you know, it's still present in things like when you think of in-flight connectivity and passenger video consumption, you'll see some of those same effects, but not to the same extent that you'll see them in residential. So, that's, those are, and if you look at kind of our history, having been, you know, in the satellite services business for, like, for over 10 years, you know, one of the things we've been able to do is still get greater productivity out of our satellites, largely from migrating a lot of the bandwidth from mobility, from residential to mobility. And then the other thing that we've done in general really well is improve the yield of the satellite. you know, the gigabits per megabuck investment in the satellites or the satellite utility by better matching supply and demand. So, you have to kind of look at all those factors to end up teasing out, you know, maintenance capex from growth capex. But, you know, we've been able to drive growth from our capex, I think, to a pretty high degree, and I think we'll do even better on the go-forward basis with the emphasis on mobility.
spk06: One other point I would add, Rick, is if you look at what I mentioned on CapEx, it's at FY24, $1.7 billion, and the range for 2025, $1.4 to $1.5. And then, as you know, a big set number of satellites are getting done in the next few years, as you heard from Mark. So we do expect FY26 to come down as we launch these satellites. So from a broader guidance perspective.
spk07: On an absolute dollar basis.
spk10: Okay. And then you'll forward to Investor Day coming up in March as well.
spk11: Yes, we will. Thanks, Rick. Thanks, everybody.
spk03: The next question comes from Chris Quilty, Quilty Space.
spk11: Investor Day in Carlsbad or New York? New York. New York.
spk10: Okay. Carlsbad's nicer, but New York's easier to get to. Question for you. The number of aircraft net ads looked a little light in the quarter. Is that primarily just seasonal or timing? And can you give us a thought of kind of what to expect on a go-forward net ad rate, either in the back half of the year or going into next year? And then a broader question on the IFC, just what's the general pipeline looking like now in terms of aircraft or airlines that are new to IFC, still coming on board? Is it a strong pipeline? Has there been weakness because of interest rates or fuel prices or just general temperament of the market?
spk07: Okay. On the first part, I'd say there are two – I mean, if you just look from a macro perspective, there have been two kind of drags on installs from the airline's perspective – One is the delivery rates of new aircraft, which have been kind of behind schedule from both of the major OEMs. And, you know, we've done well on new line fit contracts. And so the line fit, you know, the line fit, which is driven by aircraft deliveries, that's lower than, you know, lower. I mean, you just look at the look at the OEM's delivery issues, and that you can kind of gauge how that would be allocated among the different airlines, some of whom are big customers of ours. And the other one has been just the fill factor on existing flights, which has kind of sort of discouraged the airlines from or slowed down some of the retrofits on the existing fleet. And I think there's Some of that is seasonal. So on the one hand, when Sean mentioned seasonality before for the in-flight space, that part's good for us because more passengers and it's driven more demand, and it's been good for revenue, but it has slowed down installs a little bit. Backlog's still really strong, and I would say... that the pipeline of new airlines is good. You know, I think that, you know, kind of the way to put it is that, you know, the U.S. market has been probably the most forward-leaning on in-flight connectivity. I think that it's also becoming clear that the, that there's monetization strategies, right? That it's not just, it doesn't have to be just an expense for the airlines. And so that is really drawing in a lot of interest from airlines that maybe were on the sidelines before. And if they can both get the amenity and figure out how to better monetize it, that's a good combination. And I think that that is spreading more globally.
spk10: I understand. A clarification, the CAPEX guidance for next year, did you say the 1.4 to 1.5 includes a possible provision for a I6 replacement?
spk07: Yes, that's correct.
spk10: Okay. And, you know, timing-wise, I guess you've got, you know, two modern L-band satellites, the I6F1 and the AlphaBus. The I4s are 17 years old. If you get an order in next year on that satellite, we're looking at three years, does that leave enough time-wise coverage on the L-band capacity given the age of the legacy satellites?
spk11: Yes.
spk10: Running good on fuel?
spk11: Yes.
spk07: Besides the existing fleet, We also, Ray Mars had, I think, right around the time of the acquisition, announced a fleet of three I-8 satellites that'll be arriving kind of in that same timeframe, maybe a little bit earlier.
spk10: And how much capacity would those have? Because those are small geos.
spk07: We haven't been reporting the capacity on the L-band satellites. But the thing that we are focused on is, is, you know, when we talk about next-generation L-band, the big thing is increasing the capacity of those satellites dramatically. The I-8s were really aimed at, you know, extending the existing safety, you know, basically the safety and emergency services. And so, that's good, I think, in terms of shoring up the existing fleet. But part of our CapEx budget on a go-forward basis And part of what we're talking about in ecosystem building is to, uh, is to really modernize that whole fleet. And we'll talk about that separately when we're ready.
spk10: Gotcha. And final question. I mean, as you're moving away from the I four and, or sorry, the bias at four and the, you know, sort of massive capacity towards satellites that are more agile mobility, uh, capable, Does that mean it's more likely that you'll buy something off the shelf from, you know, a TALIS, a one, TALIS Alenia Space or Airbus that have, you know, software-defined satellites that they've already fielded? Or is it something that you're likely to do internally because of some, you know, design capability that you have internally?
spk07: At the time that we do it, we will definitely look at what's available off the shelf, for sure. But, We haven't seen, so far, we haven't seen things off the shelf that have the capability of the technology that we're doing on BISAT 3 or we're doing on 4. So we're going to, you know, we're going to do a comparison. One of the things we also will be able to do by holding off a few years is we will be able to do some risk reduction. When I say risk reduction, schedule risk as well as budget risk. So we, you know, we intend to do a lot better in terms of scheduling budget on the following ones. And then also there's some really interesting technologies that we can test that can also reduce costs and improve productivity. So those are the things that we're looking at. But there's some, you know, so far, you know, on VISA 3, absent that anomaly, everything's worked. well, and four was just an enhancement of that. So that technology, that's something that we can draw on if things play out the way we expect.
spk10: Gotcha. And partly, did you say whether the EMEA satellite was going to Americas and the Pacific bird to EMEA, or have you decided that yet?
spk07: We have options on both. really focused on meeting the needs of our mobility customers, and that's how we're going to prioritize them.
spk10: Okay, great. Thank you very much. Thanks.
spk03: Edison, you from Deutsche Bank, have the next question.
spk01: Hey, thank you very much for taking our questions. First, as you kind of peel away at MRSATs, do you have any – updated thoughts maybe on the various pieces that may not be strategically important, especially on the L-band side. Just curious, any thoughts there?
spk07: No, I mean, we are really, we are very interested in L-band. I think that, you know, Inmarsat has applied L-band in some, you know, a variety of very different markets. There's U.S. defense, there's international government applications, There's really interesting voice and data applications. And there are these safety ones. What we see is, you know, our long-term objective really is to grow with the direct-to-device market and the IoT market. And when I say IoT, it's really going to be these shared terrestrial and mobile, these devices that can operate off both terrestrial and mobile. We're aiming to to be able to bring some of those to market soon. And then we do think that things that we do to the satellites to enable that can really kind of boost the existing mobile satellite services market substantially. So we're really interested in the services, the whole range of services that Inmarsat performs now. We think that's a good foundation for somebody who wants to go in markets.
spk01: And you mentioned D2D, and I think you've kind of alluded to some potential paths into getting in there. Do we have any kind of updated thoughts about D2D going forward, maybe using that extra L band?
spk07: Not yet. We are working on some, and I expect that we'll have More to talk about next quarter, but we're not going to say more about it today.
spk01: Got it. And then there's one last one on IFC. So, you know, I think there were some announcements from one of MRSAT's customers, Qatar, and Starlink. And there was a little bit of confusion, I think, at least from our end or on the public end. Can you maybe just go over exactly what kind of happened there with Starlink? Is it... Did they, like, shift that over, or what exactly is going on?
spk07: I think it's probably best to ask them. I don't think we want to speak. We don't want to speak for them on this.
spk11: Okay. Thank you. Thanks, Edison.
spk03: Next question comes from Louis DePalma, William Blair.
spk08: Mark, Rick, Sean, Robert, and Peter, good afternoon. What percentage of revenue will the residential fixed broadband be by the end of fiscal 2024 as it seems that you're de-emphasizing it?
spk02: Yeah, Lou, I can jump in here. So I think what we've talked about in the past, right, is that part of our business with, you know, that combined with Emerson and so forth is less than 15%. And you know, as we continue to prioritize our bandwidth and, you know, work with our, supporting the growth in our IFC business, you'd expect that to, you know, continue to scale downward.
spk08: Okay, thanks, Sean. For, have you disclosed who the third Viasat 3 launch contract is with? And also for that launch contract, I think you said in the fourth calendar quarter of 2024. Have you been able to procure insurance for that launch?
spk07: On the launch provider, we will put out a press release. I mean, generally, we want to cooperate with the launch providers just to make sure that they approve the release for it. So, we'll do that in the near future on the insurance.
spk02: Yeah, I can jump in there. On the second satellite, that insurance is already done, just as a reminder, and we're starting to work on the next one. I think that that's kind of in process, but we're good to have the second one all wrapped up.
spk07: Just to add on to that, the insurance, the insurers tend to be very detail-oriented, so the review that we're going to have next week with the antenna manufacturer, even though it's a different satellite, it's a different antenna manufacturer for flight three than flight two, insurers tend to be, you know, they're really interested in the details. And so I think that having those details available will help them understand what happened and will help us with placing the insurance.
spk08: Great. And As it relates to the fiscal 25 CapEx guidance, is it a good estimate to assume that the I6 replacement satellite would cost around $400 million? So if you don't elect to go ahead with that, that you could just subtract it from the 1.4 to 1.5 billion number of You know, what could be your capex for fiscal 25?
spk07: Now, for fiscal 25, what was in the budget would be the portion of replacing that mission that would have been spent in that fiscal year.
spk11: Okay.
spk08: Do you have an estimate on what that would be? No.
spk07: We're not going to do that yet. We are evaluating multiple options. and we're aiming to simplify it. So, again, we're not – we are going to make sure that we make the right decision. We're not ready yet, and so it just would be premature to give a dollar value for that.
spk08: Okay, and one final one. As it relates to direct-to-device, It seems that Inmarsat was previously partnering with Skylo, and they've established chip partnerships with Samsung's chip arm and MediaTek. Have you continued those partnerships such that you would, in effect, be the direct-to-device partner for Skylo's you know, future initiatives?
spk07: Yeah, I mean, I think you're going to see kind of ecosystems evolve around the directed device, and they're going to include device makers and chip makers, spectrum holders, satellite operators, and others. And the ones that you described are all attractive, you know, members of those ecosystems. And I think, you know, as we've mentioned before, we think Inmarsat's got a really interesting role to play, especially in, you know, there will be different generations of standards. The current one, which is the narrowband IoT, you know, non-terrestrial network, I think you'll see those come to market soon, right, like within, you know, within quarters. And, yes, there's definitely a role for us to play there.
spk08: Excellent. Thanks, Mark, and thanks, everyone. Thanks, Louie.
spk03: And just a reminder, it is Star 1. If you have a question, we'll pause for just a moment. And I'll hand the conference back to our speakers for any additional or closing remarks. Okay.
spk07: So thanks, everybody, for joining us this afternoon. Just want to remind you of a few important takeaways from the quarter. We felt the results were really good. Generated, you know, 16% year-over-year revenue growth and 20% year-over-year adjusted EBITDA growth on like-for-like basis. We are doing well on the Inmarsat integration program. We're kind of ahead of schedule and ahead of budget so far. We think we have a clear and and good value proposition on global mobility that's built on meaningful and granular service-level commitments, even in the most challenging places and times. That's resonated with customers, especially in the very competitive U.S. in-flight market. And we think the same kinds of analytics, insights, and bringing confidence to global markets in aviation, maritime, and government, I think that's going to work for us. We're confident our business will continue to grow revenue in adjusted EBITDA in fiscal year 2025. We'll give more additional guidance on that next quarter for FY25. And we're aiming to become free cash flow positive in the first half of calendar year 2025. We've taken a lot of the steps that we think we're going to need to get there, and we think we'll get meaningful and sustainable free cash flow revenue. during fiscal 26. So with that, I look forward to updating you all on our continued progress next quarter. And I'll hand it back to the operator now.
spk03: Thank you. And once again, everyone, that does conclude today's conference. Thank you all for your participation. You may now disconnect.
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