Good morning, and welcome to the Iridium Communications Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there'll be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Kenneth Levy, VP of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Anthony. Good morning, and welcome to Iridium's Second Quarter 2022 Earnings Call. Joining me on this morning's call are our CEO, Matt Desch, and our CFO, Tom Fitzpatrick. Today's call will begin with a discussion of our second quarter results, followed by Q&A. I trust you've had an opportunity to review this morning's earnings release, which is available on the investor relations section of Iridium's website. Before I turn things over to Matt, I'd like to caution all participants that our call may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.
Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical fact and include statements about our future expectations, plans, and prospects. Such forward-looking statements are based upon our current beliefs and expectations and are subject to risks which could cause actual results to differ from forward-looking statements. Such risks are more fully discussed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Our remarks today should be considered in light of such risks. Any forward-looking statements represent our views only as of today, and while we may elect to update forward-looking statements at some point in the future, we specifically disclaim any obligation to do so even if our views or expectations change.
During the call, we'll also be referring to certain non-GAAP financial measures, including Operational EBITDA, pro forma free cash flow, free cash flow yield, and free cash flow conversion. These non-GAAP financial measures are not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. Please refer to today's earnings release in the investor relations section of our website for further explanation of these non-GAAP financial measures and a reconciliation to the most directly comparable GAAP measures. With that, let me turn things over to Matt.
Thanks, Ken, and good morning, everyone. As you all saw, Iridium's business outperformed nicely in the quarter, recording record revenue and Operational EBITDA. This momentum gives us confidence to raise our top and bottom line guidance for the year. We're seeing sustained strength from our partner channel in signing up new customers and purchasing equipment, which is the result of Iridium's strong competitive position and unique offerings. This underlying strength helps to shield us against changes in the global financial environment. We believe we're positioned well to grow just as we have through past cycles, even if recent concerns of an economic downturn come to fruition.
Our business remains vibrant and resilient. This is owed to the unique business Iridium is focused on, characterized by safety services and mission-critical applications, as well as the durability of our business model. While no business is recession-proof, we've grown nicely through past downturns, in large part due to the diversity of our customer base and the industries that we serve. Iridium continues to occupy a unique lane, even among satellite companies, and today that lane is characterized by its strong demand, growth opportunities, and some pronounced areas of upside, which I like to call accelerators.
Let me speak to each of these three areas. First, demand for Iridium equipment services has never been stronger. This has been driving hardware sales over the last 12 months and kept net subscriber additions near all-time highs in our commercial business. In the second quarter, we added 95,000 net subscribers, which means over the last year, we've grown our subscriber base by 16% to almost 1.9 million users. I can't think of another satellite communications company that makes more connections to things from space than Iridium.
We've continued to see momentum in our core handset business, in part due to ongoing demand in Ukraine, continued strong growth in Iridium Push-to-Talk services for global work groups and governments, and general acceptance by the market that our satellite phones and Iridium GO! smartphone hotspots are the gold standard for remote communications. We also believe that our successful management of supply chain obstacles over the past year or so has allowed us to ship devices when others could not. Further, Iridium enjoys a global reputation for service reliability.
This is particularly relevant to the recent demand we've seen in Ukraine. Partners and subscribers tell us that Iridium's handsets work much better in battle zones where GPS is now being jammed because our devices do not rely on this location technology to connect like others do. All these things are combining to create a very strong year of growth for these core product lines. As Tom will go into further, we believe commercial voice and data is a resurgent area of growth for us into the future.
Moving on to IoT, our industrial partners continue to prosper and grow their subscriber counts, but it is the personal user that remains the real story lately. We've continued to ride a wave of demand for Iridium-connected personal satellite communication devices as partners like Garmin, ZOLEO, Bivy, and others have developed new solutions. These small, lightweight consumer devices are great for mobility and offer users reliable two-way connectivity, which they often pair with their smartphones even when they're off the grid. Our personal satellite communication services have gained in popularity, especially as the prices of these devices have fallen in recent years and retail consumer awareness of them has grown.
In maritime, we're pleased to see the growing adoption of Iridium Certus reach quarterly installation levels that we long have been expecting. Ship owners are realizing that Iridium Certus provides highly capable and reliable L-band service at a price point that makes it accessible and attractive to both small boat owners and large fleet operators. Net activation of these terminals continue to expand. Quarter two was another strong quarter, with subs up 12% from the same quarter last year. Overall, Broadband revenue growth also remains strong, up 14% from a year ago.
This is even before we have started to see a widespread use of the new lower cost Iridium Certus 200 terminals that are just now getting into the channel. I think it's quite clear that demand for our commercial satellite services is healthy and growing across the board. Now in terms of opportunities, let me highlight three that I think you should keep a close eye on. First, within IoT, I discussed the momentum we're seeing for personal satellite communications. We already have more than 670,000 active users on our network, and that number appears to be accelerating with the introduction of new products and features from our partners.
We expect that these consumer-oriented devices will continue to be a long-term driver of IoT revenue and subscriber growth. Our next big opportunity is being fueled by Iridium Certus 100 service, which we call mid-band. It delivers a higher speed data connection than our legacy narrowband offerings in a very small form factor, perfect for applications where size, weight, and power are considerations, like in segments of aviation, where our partners are introducing new terminals for the growing unmanned aerial vehicle market. Our opportunity has only expanded in the last year now that our technology partners have enabled efficient video transmission over the Iridium Certus platform.
The intersection of these applications with new Iridium Certus 100 devices should unleash a new wave of users and applications that have high ARPU. Some of the early technical applications are now available to Iridium customers, and we expect these solutions to only grow in the quarters and years ahead. Lastly, I want to highlight our emerging opportunity in aviation Broadband. We're expecting to finally see Iridium Certus aviation terminals start activating on our network this year and next. The timeline for aviation services have been necessarily long due to the regulatory testing and rigorous certifications required for each piece of equipment that enters the cockpit.
As a pilot, this is one business opportunity that I remain very excited about and I can't wait to see come to market. Iridium has been working with a handful of partners who will be launching their respective products using Iridium Certus in the second half of this year. These partners are closing critical certification milestones, performing successful flight tests, and some will be entering service with first installations in the coming months in both rotary and fixed-wing applications.
In terms of my third theme on future upside accelerators, Iridium is always active in looking to expand beyond our traditional markets to grow even faster. I'd like to highlight three accelerators that hold great promise for us. One of these new business opportunities was awarded in late May when the Space Development Agency chose General Dynamics Mission Systems and Iridium to build and operate their ground operation system for their new LEO satellite network. This $324 million prime contract leverages Iridium's expertise in flying satellites and managing ground system operations to provide us entry into a new type of business with the U.S. government.
We're proud of our capabilities and know that this contract with the Space Development Agency will enhance knowledge of the advanced technology around an important network like this. The $133 million in revenue that we expect to receive over seven years from this award will be seen in our top-line results, but the strategic impact of a closer alignment with the SDA is what is most important. We're excited to begin work and are honored to see our capabilities recognized and explore what else might become of this expanding relationship with the Department of Defense.
Another accelerator for us is Aireon and their continued product evolution and adoption. In late June, Iridium augmented its position in this ten-year-old joint venture. Our new $50 million preferred equity investment will help accelerate Aireon's development of their commercial data service business, which will allow Aireon to monetize their high-quality ADS-B data set with customers beyond its core use in air traffic surveillance. Aireon's data has value to commercial enterprises that assess, manage, and interface with the commercial aviation industry. In fact, Boeing just signed up Aireon to use their data for its own safety toolkit and advanced data analytics capabilities.
As Aireon grows, the benefit to Iridium will be an increase in the value of our substantial equity stake in this enterprise, as well as dividends down the line. In another area of long-term promise to us today, you'll also see from the 8-K filing accompanying our press release that we furthered our vision of connecting millions of consumer devices to our network by entering into a development agreement with a strategic partner to enable Iridium's technology in smartphones.
We likely won't have much more to say about this arrangement until products are ready for market, but obviously it's a demonstration that we're making good progress on the execution of our vision and something that can provide some significant upside in the future. In total, all three of these partnership opportunities are additive to Iridium's business. Rest assured that we will provide additional details about each as the time is right. However, it is safe to say that they serve as accelerators to our story, which should further excite our shareholders.
To summarize, we are continuing to experience strong demand this year. We are excited about the areas of growth we're developing, and we are actively working on some accelerators to our business, which we believe will be material in the future. We feel very good about where we are and look forward to continued strong growth in 2022 and beyond. I think you'll have to agree, whether you're a long-time Iridium shareholder or you've only recently come to our story, we're a particularly interesting company to watch in the space industry or any industry for that matter, given our unique potential. With that, I'll turn the call over to Tom for a review of our financials. Tom?
Thanks, Matt, and good morning, everyone. I'll get started by summarizing our key financial metrics for the quarter and providing some color on the trends we're seeing in our business lines. I'll recap our increased guidance for 2022 and close with a review of our liquidity position and capital structure. Iridium continued to execute well in the second quarter in an environment characterized by robust equipment demand and meaningful subscriber growth. We generated total revenue of $174.9 million in the second quarter, which was up 17% from last year's comparable quarter.
The improvement reflects ongoing strength in our commercial business lines, a pickup in engineering and support work, and unprecedented demand for subscriber equipment. Operational EBITDA hit a record $105.9 million in the second quarter. This was up 12% from the prior year's quarter and supported by strength across all business lines. These trends give us confidence in raising our full-year outlook to better reflect the ongoing demand for our L-band services, which we expect to continue in the second half of the year and drive incremental subscriber growth.
On the commercial side of our business, service revenue was up 11% this quarter to $106.4 million. This increase reflected continued strength in voice services, IoT, and Broadband. Commercial voice and data revenue grew by $5.2 million or 12% in the second quarter. As you know, we have historically characterized this business as a low, single-digit grower. As Matt noted, there were two contributors to this outsized growth this quarter. First, our newer service offerings, Iridium GO! and Push-to-Talk, are really hitting their stride. We experienced combined growth of about 50% on these two products in the second quarter.
Together, they accounted for about 1/3 of the growth in the voice and data business line. We expect continued strength, strong growth from these products going forward. Second, we experienced materially higher sales of prepaid vouchers in the quarter. We believe this strength was driven by two factors. The first we have noted previously, higher sales volumes associated with the conflict in Ukraine, while the second we attribute to increased sales volume resulting from our primary competitors not having handsets in stock to meet demand. Prepaid revenues accounted for about 1/3 of the growth in our voice and data business this quarter.
The balance of our growth in this business line came from our core service offerings that also benefited somewhat from the competitive environment as described. In summary, the new product growth will recur, but some of the other growth may wane a bit as circumstances change. We expect the voice and data business line will generate high single-digit growth this year, and we'll see where things settle out, but it now appears that this business is more like a solid mid-single digit grower on average based on latest trends. In commercial IoT, we continue to benefit from consumer demand for personal satellite communications.
IoT revenue totaled $30.6 million in the second quarter, up 13% from the prior year quarter. While these subscribers generate lower ARPU than our traditional industrial IoT users, they remain very attractive contributor to our service revenue growth in light of the minimal comparative network resources they consume. As a result, IoT ARPU was $7.96 this quarter compared to $8.69 in the prior year period. Commercial IoT subs grew 22% from last year's second quarter, fueled in part by 80,000 net new additions. This was the second-best on record. These data subscribers now represent 76% of Iridium's billable commercial subscribers, up from 74% in the year ago period.
Through June 30th, we had over 670,000 personal communication devices on our network, and we continue to believe that these consumer-oriented users will drive IoT growth for the foreseeable future. Commercial Broadband revenue rose 14% from the prior year quarter to $12.1 million. Activations were driven by ongoing adoption of Iridium Certus terminals in maritime. Our partners are seeing good access to vessels, which should keep subscriber growth strong in Broadband, where we continue to grow our offering and are seeing strong adoption of Iridium Certus as a companion to VSAT terminals.
Hosting and other data services revenue was $15.2 million this quarter, up 5% from the prior year quarter on higher data usage. Turning to our government service business, we reported revenue of $26.5 million in the second quarter, up 3% from $25.8 million in the prior year quarter. This increase reflects the contractual terms of our long-term EMSS contract. Subscriber equipment continues to benefit from strong demand, rising 55% from the prior year period to $33.8 million. As Matt noted, we continue to receive new orders for equipment which support our forecast for full-year equipment sales well above 2021's level.
We expect equipment margin dollars to be up materially as well. Equipment margin as a percent of revenue is expected to decline this year to a range of between 35% and 40%. The reduction in margin percentage is primarily driven by a mix shift toward chipsets that have lower margin, which are widely utilized by our personal communication partners and driving significant subscriber growth. We are also, to a lesser extent, experiencing some cost increases as we manage through supply chain issues. Engineering and support revenue was $8.3 million in the second quarter as compared to $6.8 million in the year-ago period.
The rise reflects activity related to the episodic nature of our contract work for the U.S. government and commercial customers. In all, the trends we saw in the second quarter were quite strong. Accordingly, we are increasing our growth outlook for service revenue to between 7% and 9% in 2022 and raising our full-year guidance for operational EBITDA to between $410 million and $420 million. Some of the items helping to frame our thoughts on EBITDA include the recent SDA award and our outlook for SG&A.
With the award of the Space Development Agency's contract to General Dynamics Mission Systems and Iridium in May, we anticipate that Iridium will receive $133 million in revenue under the award over its seven-year term. This could grow with future opportunities. Revenue will vary from year to year and appear in our engineering and support line. We expect work under the SDA contract to generate small margins, which we view as acceptable given its strategic importance. This, in combination with the increase in equipment revenues and decrease in equipment margin percentage, will drive our EBITDA margin percentage below 60% this year.
On the expense side of the ledger, we continue to expect spending on SG&A to rise this year as we incur higher recruiting and development costs, accrue for higher stock compensation expenses, and also make additions to our support infrastructure. I noted these items back in April and anticipate that, in total, they will result in SG&A being about 20% higher in 2022 compared to last year. Moving to our capital position, as of June 30, 2022, Iridium had a cash and cash equivalents balance of approximately $227 million. Iridium's growing cash flow is one of the reasons that our board upsized our share repurchase program with an additional $300 million earlier this year.
In the second quarter, Iridium purchased approximately 1 million shares of common stock at a total purchase price of $35 million. Into July, we have remained active in the market, purchasing an additional 290,000 shares at a cost of approximately $11.2 million. Since the original authorization of our buyback program in 2021, we have retired approximately 9.4 million shares at a total price of about $344 million or $36.47 per share. At this time, the remaining capacity on our program is approximately $256 million. We will continue to be disciplined in executing on share repurchases.
Net leverage was 3.4 x our EBITDA at the end of the second quarter. This was down from 3.9 x a year earlier and includes the impacts of our buybacks during the first half of 2022. Our long-term target for net leverage continues to be between 2.5x and 3.5 x our EBITDA at the end of 2023. We expect to be within this target range even after giving effect to all share buybacks authorized by our board. Capital expenditures in the second quarter were $17.5 million and included initial spend of $7.5 million related to our launch of up to five ground spare satellites.
You will recall that this launch of our ground spares is a one-time event with a total expected cost of about $35 million, which will be spent this year and next. We anticipate that the launch will take place in 2023. We have previously indicated that we expect annual CapEx to average about $40 million during our CapEx holiday. Inclusive of the launch of our ground spares, we do not expect our CapEx spending in 2022 to exceed $75 million. This spending can be comfortably supported by Iridium's strong cash and cash equivalents balance and ongoing expectations for strong free cash flow in 2022.
If we use the midpoint of our 2022 EBITDA guidance and back off $66 million in net interest pro forma for our current debt structure, the maximum expected $75 million in CapEx for this year and $14 million in working capital, inclusive of the appropriate hosted payload adjustment, we're projecting pro forma free cash flow of approximately $260 million. These metrics represent a conversion rate of 63% in 2022 and a yield of nearly 6%. I would note that Iridium put in place an interest rate cap in July 2021 to hedge $1 billion of notional value on our term loan.
This positioned us well to weather the current interest rate environment. A more detailed description of these cash flow metrics, along with the reconciliation to GAAP measures, is available in a supplemental presentation under Events on our investor relations website. In closing, we're very excited about Iridium's business prospects and the new revenue streams we will soon realize from the SDA contract awarded in June, as well as our entry into new markets.
We have all worked hard through the challenges of the pandemic during the past two years to execute efficiently and get to this point. As Matt noted, we are enjoying strong demand trends today and executing on a number of promising business opportunities. As I look back on the 12 years I've been with Iridium, I've witnessed an accelerated pacing of growth and technological capabilities. It took Iridium 18 years to get to one million subscribers, which occurred in 2018.
We expect to reach two million subscribers as we exit this year, illustrating the acceleration of our business. It's very rewarding to see this progress. Given the strength of our personal communications business and current pace of growth, we'll likely surpass three million subscribers in less than four years. This is an especially exciting time for our company, our partners, and employees. We're committed to return capital to our shareholders while still investing in the business and pursuing new vectors for growth. I truly believe that for Iridium, the best is yet to come. With that, I'll turn things back to the operator for the Q&A.
We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. For our question, please press star, then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question will come from Ric Prentiss with Raymond James. You may now go ahead.
Thanks. Good morning, everyone.
Hey, Ric.
Hey. Obviously, I'd like to see the guidance raise, particularly in this economic environment. Matt, you talked a little bit about how you guys have weathered different economic situations. Help us understand where you're at today and looking into this current environment, how you see it playing out into, like, your midterm guidance. Any thoughts about updating that guidance or how this current market conditions are affecting that?
Well, you know, I think we've been looking carefully at trends and everything, and just haven't really seen much yet. You have to expect that there's, you know, some potential impact perhaps more on equipment than anything else, just as people will be more careful about purchases, though we're not seeing that, you know, at this time yet, but kinda considering that going forward. I remember, you know, the 2008, 2009 period, you know, we weren't public until 2009, but even looking at 2008, you know, we had- w e really grew. Our service revenue continued to grow well through that whole period.
We had a down year one year in terms of equipment, I think, in 2009, but it really popped back up in 2010 quickly too. I think it's all just due to the nature of the highly diversified, you know, business that we have, the fact that, you know, most of our services are pretty life critical and important, in the industries that they are. You know, we're not currently really expecting to change sort of our midterm or even long-term look right now, on any reason right now. Those signs just aren't clear at this point.
You mentioned on your long-term accelerants, in 8-K talking about the development agreement, to bring your technology to the smartphones. I know you can't say a lot about that, but any thought about timeframe we should be thinking about that, and people who haven't had time to get all through the 8-K, any extra language there that we should be particularly looking for?
Well, you're right. There's not much more we can say about that, which I'm sure is a little frustrating. You know, certainly wanted to, you know, we thought it was important to show some progress that we're making in that area. It's obviously an important strategic relationship, and excited about the potential there. You know, the timing really is not something I can speak to. I think you'll just have to wait until products are introduced. Mainly, in some ways, we can't talk about it 'cause it's not really that much within our control at this point. We have some work to do ourselves, but it's really up to our partner and others to execute on that.
Obviously, some of the big news in satellite land over the last two days was a LEO operator, a startup OneWeb, now officially announced the merger with GEO operator Eutelsat. Any thoughts about what that says for the industry or anything that it means for Iridium?
Well, I don't think it means much for Iridium. I think it speaks to the competitive dynamics in that commodity Broadband space that we've long talked about is kind of ancillary to our business. You know, there's a lot of competition in that space. There's a lot of concern about you know, the future environments. I think there's a realignment of partners that we saw from Inmarsat and Viasat.
I think you know, perhaps there's some choosing of you know, there's some consolidation. I guess this would be continued consolidation in sort of that market segment. I don't know that it speaks so much to orbital dynamics as it does to competition you know, and other aspects there. But that's a story for others to really speak to besides us.
All right. Thanks, guys. Stay well.
Thanks, Ric.
Thanks, Ric.
Take care.
Next question will come from Landon Park with Morgan Stanley. You may now go ahead.
Great. Thanks for taking the questions, everyone. Good morning. I'll take one more swing at the smartphone announcement. Can you say anything about what type of company you're partnering with on this agreement? I guess, you know, if we're looking out, you know, five, 10 years, do you think that this has the potential to be your single largest, you know, revenue bucket over time if the technology is successful? I guess, what is your confidence level in being able to develop a successful integration of your technology into smartphones?
Well, that was a good swing, Landon. I'm not sure I can help much with either of those questions. I'm sorry for that. You know, we've been talking a little bit about this opportunity over the last couple quarters. This is a good milestone, but it's, you know, not definitive, nor are we representing it in any specific way, at this time as to what it means, when it means, and who it means with, at this time. I can say, you know, there's over one billion new smartphones a year. There's something like seven billion smartphones out there, in the coming years.
Obviously, making a connection to those is something that others have hinted and expect we'll try to do. I think it's gonna be a sizable market to make any kind of connection to devices like smartphones. I wouldn't even limit it to smartphones. I mean, we're talking about sort of things that consumers might have or might be contained in many other kinds of consumer devices. We believe that's our vision, that's what our network is very well suited for. It's, you know, I think what we've been doing over the last 23 years has prepared us for this kind of market. Don't wanna speak to the size, but obviously we don't think it's insignificant, so.
Great. I appreciate that. Can you speak at all to the timeline that we should be looking for? I guess the 8-K reference is a firmer agreement by the end of the year. Is that sort of the next milestone we should be looking at?
I mean, yes, we do need to complete a service provider agreement that's, and even the development agreements are subject to that agreement. You know, in terms of when this will affect our business, obviously, that's out in the future, and it's really, like I said, not in our control, so I just don't wanna- I don't wanna set any specific expectations about that, which I appreciate it's frustrating and won't help your models much, but believe we at least needed to announce that we're making definitive steps here.
Understood. Then just the last one on this element. How should we think about the capacity of the next network in terms of, you know, if you do end up loading on a lot more sort of low usage subs here, how should we think about what does the capacity of your network really allow for over the next, you know, decade? Then just on a separate item, I'd love for you to opine just on the Aireon investment and how you're thinking about the TAM there and the type of value you think you can create out of your holdings.
Yeah. I mean, our network is built for extreme, you know, it very efficient short communications, which IoT is, you know, as you can see by just sort of our performance, is a key area of growth in our area. What we do delivering to even more devices, there's a lot more capacity still to be utilized for that because those are very efficient uses of our network. Kinda will break the model of how many millions of subscribers we would have on our network, obviously with that, but it's more about the kind of amount of messages or data transmissions they'd have through it, which our network is well suited to support.
As far as Aireon in terms of the addressable market- y eah, I mean, obviously, we believe Aireon is expanding their addressable market, which we already thought was pretty significant in managing the air traffic management aspect of it. The surveillance, which, frankly, with, you know, people back on airplanes flying internationally is growing again, and their revenues, I think, internally are growing in that area as they recover back to pre-pandemic levels and beyond as they continue to expand their subscribers there.
But as I've said in the past, we were really quite interested in the progress that they're making monetizing their data set in this commercial data services area. They've already got a number of wins. They have a number of new products that they have developed and they're marketing. You know, with this additional investment, we saw them able to further out the offerings that they could make in terms of exploiting that data set in a number of new, interesting ways. It is expanding the addressable market. I can't speak to exactly the numbers.
I know we've talked to the surveillance market in the past. There's a couple others out there that are also trying to get in this market, but they don't have the same data set we do. They certainly talk to pretty big potential for the market, and I agree with that. It's still early days and we think there's a lot of growth potential there. It's the reason why we kinda doubled down here and we're able to sort of expand our investment in this because we really think over the next couple of years, that's really gonna pay off.
Just in terms of size, Aireon has estimated their TAM to be $750 million a year. They've said that for some time, and we've said that we expect our dividends from Aireon to exceed what we get out of them from hosting. We get $37 million in hosting and data out of Aireon. We expected dividends to eventually be greater than that. We're excited by this opportunity.
I would only say the $750 million was sort of a pre-commercial data services sort of TAM, but it's hard to say exactly how much that adds to it in this case, so.
On the dividends, when should we expect those to start flowing?
We've said eventually. We have [audio distortion]
Fair enough. I really appreciate the questions.
Yeah.
Our next question will come from Walter Piecyk with LightShed. You may now go ahead.
Thanks. So what is the process for, I guess, how a technology gets enabled in smartphones? Meaning that does the ultimate demand have to come from the device maker? Is that who drives it? Whether the agreement's with the device maker itself or a component guy or whatever it is, like, how does that typically manifest itself? Because I wouldn't imagine that if it's not the device maker, that someone else would expend development dollars, unless they knew that at the end of the day there was gonna be a device maker that would actually wanted to put it in their phone.
Yeah. I mean, answering that question, Walt, and it's a good one, but this is not something I can kinda go into at this time- I mean, that really goes beyond what we're really capable of saying today. But I don't disagree with you that there obviously you wouldn't sign agreements unless there were everyone viewed there to be a sizable opportunity in the future.
Thanks. Why does someone need a service provider agreement? 'Cause, you know, if I think about my AT&T phone, then I've got a soft SIM. I can be using AT&T in my terrestrial network. I go to Utah, whatever, and I can just flip to a soft SIM that's another service provider. So why is there a need in this case for a service provider agreement?
I'm not gonna go into the business model that we are anticipating for this, but, you know, we are not the service provider, so anytime we provide service through others, there has to be sort of an agreement on, you know, how it would be priced and how it would be delivered and that sort of thing. It's more of our agreement with them, about how it would be delivered.
No, I understand that. Presumably, a device maker themselves could say, "Hey, buy my phone," and then when it roams off of the cellular provider that you're using it, then me, Apple, me, you know, Samsung, whoever, can say, "This phone's gonna work in more places." I don't understand why you would need a service provider in that context.
I assure you we need a service provider agreement, and so that's why we're negotiating it.
Okay. Just last question. The share repurchase, it was down obviously, you know, given the quarterly results and this announcement, is the reason you didn't buy as much stock back this quarter because you knew this announcement was coming, or is there other kind of factors that went into the share repurchase activity this quarter?
I don't think we're gonna go into exactly why and how we do that. Obviously that's sort of disclosing, but I think that's probably all we can say about that. That's, you know, I don't know if ...
Well, the reason wasn't that we would've liked to buy back the stock at the levels that you saw in June, but that wasn't feasible.
Why wasn't it feasible, though?
We're not gonna go into that.
Okay. Thank you.
Our next question will come from Hamed Khorsand with BWS Financial. You may now go ahead.
Hey, good morning. I just wanted to see, how comfortable are you with channel inventory? How are you managing it and making sure partners aren't, you know, pre-ordering too much ahead of expected installs?
Yeah, that's been an ongoing sort of process that our sales and marketing team has done in conjunction with our, you know, almost 500 partners. There's obviously been a lot of demand out there for us, as you can see, much higher than we were expecting at the beginning of the year, and we've been, you know, we've been on sort of allocations for a number of our components, a number of our devices, really for the last 12 months or so here.
While we're catching up, we've had to go back and kinda work with each of them individually, understanding 'cause a lot of them have supply issues of their own and everything. You know, trying to make sure that we allocated our devices to the places that could matter the most has been sort of a, you know, a bit of an art, you know, some science, but a lot of art and a lot of discussions.
I feel good about, you know, how it's gone because our partners are telling us that, you know, they feel that it's been an open, transparent and, you know, productive sort of process. We've been catching up in some areas here, still behind in some others. Could've had an even better second quarter, but, you know, I think that we'll be catching up a lot of this through the rest of the year, assuming we don't have any other big supply chain shocks or anything.
But we seem to- I mean, I have a really outstanding supply chain team who's done, I think, an amazing job over the last year of managing quite a complex environment here to be able to continue equipment-level growth through this sort of unprecedented demand, and manage through all the kinda little issues that keep sort of popping up just due to the normal environment everybody's having to go through.
Okay. My other question was on these personal devices. Is this predominantly still a North America sales process, or are you seeing partners come on board from different geographies?
Well, it's never been just North America. I mean, obviously North America's been a strong market for us, but we have partners in Europe, Asia, really everywhere around the world. I was just in a partner conference in Europe, and we have a strong and growing group of partners in Europe, Middle East. We definitely have quite a few and have been growing nicely in Asia. I forget how many. I just saw the number that we added last year in Asia alone, which is, you know, across the region there, too. No, it's a global phenomenon of the partner base that we have.
Okay, great. Thank you.
Next question will come from Gregory Burns with Sidoti & Co. You may now go ahead.
Morning. The hosted and data payload was up a little bit, this quarter, and it sounded like it was from growth from Satelles. Is this, like, a new. Is there new growth opportunities emerging for Satelles? Should we expect that line item to continue to grow? Thank you.
Yes, Greg, we expect that to grow over time.
Okay. In terms of the SDA contract, it sounds like it's not like a straight line revenue realization there, but what's the timing of when revenue, you know, we should start to see revenue from that hitting the P&L.
It'll be heavier in the first two years, then it'll decrease for the final five years. There's a heavy lift in the first couple of years, and then it just goes to maintenance in the back five.
Revenues should start flowing this quarter, like, in the third quarter?
Yes.
Okay. In terms of the timing on Certus 100, it sounds like you're making progress there, bringing some new applications to market. When should we expect to see revenues start picking up from those new applications?
Yeah, I mean, you're gonna see that flow into both voice and data line as well as the IoT line, depending upon sort of the applications. I'm seeing, you know, there's a whole bunch of new products that are getting announced all the time. In fact, I just know that Oshkosh is starting this week, and there's a couple of our partners are announcing some products for the general aviation market, built on Certus 100 technology. I think you're gonna see some consumer devices in the coming quarters that are sort of built around that technology that supply both voice and higher speed data services.
Like I said, UAV market is a number of different partners are going after that, but that all depends on, you know, how the growth of their individual markets go. There's a lot of excitement about that. You know, we see surveillance devices out there. Just a bunch of applications. Also a lot of interest in the government for applications that fit sort of, you know, state and military kind of applications as well. It's a broad range. We're starting to see the first revenues already.
I think that's gonna build over time like anything because there's often a lot of sort of other development required for a very tailored development around a technology like this that's never existed before. I mean, we've noticed this in other technologies like Push-to-Talk and other things. It kind of grows slowly in the first year or two and then kind of gathers momentum and then really kind of takes off as the solutions are well established and, you know, the sales channels are well established. I'm expecting this will just be a, you know, it will kind of follow that same trajectory.
Okay. Okay, great. Thank you.
Yep.
Our next question will come from Caleb Henry with Quilty Analytics. You may now go ahead.
Thank you. Hi, guys. I just had a couple questions about the Relativity launch deal. I think it's been a couple years since it was announced. You said the launches are happening in 2023. How many missions do you expect? I think this is their smaller rocket. I think it's the Terran 1. The original announcement was for up to six. You said on the call this will be five satellites that are launching. I'm just curious what the logic was behind launching five and keeping one ground spare. Thanks.
Hey, Caleb. Yeah, I think you're assuming a little too much there. We do have a arrangement with Relativity for future launches that have been prescribed, but the vehicle that we were talking about there can only launch really one of our satellites. We haven't named the launch provider for our launch in 2023, but you can probably figure out it's five satellites instead of one, and that wouldn't necessarily fit the current profile for the launch provider you just suggested.
Okay. The spare launches are not going to involve Relativity then?
Well, I said we haven't named the launch provider, but I've given you a lot of information to figure that out. Okay? Just haven't decided to name the launch provider yet.
Okay. I guess just one follow-up, and then I'll let it go. Do you still have an arrangement with Relativity to launch spares, or has that been replaced by this future agreement?
We do have an arrangement still that hasn't been terminated. It provides for the ability to launch satellites in the future at our discretion, but it was never- i t offered the opportunity to launch but didn't require a specific number of satellites to launch. We'll still have, you know, a spare left after this launch. We'll see.
Okay. Thanks.
Okay.
Our next question will come from Louie DiPalma with William Blair. You may now go ahead.
Good morning, Matt, Tom, and Ken. What an action-packed earnings call.
Thank you, Louie. I agree.
First, I just wanted to commend Tom for hedging the floating rate debt, and then I cover another company who was downgraded recently because of floating rate debt exposure. That was very savvy, Tom, and your team.
I've have to pay him more if you keep that up, Louie. Stop that.
Second, related to the smartphone announcement and the seven or eight questions that followed, are you looking to be exclusive with a smartphone OEM, or are you gonna be open to several smartphone OEMs?
That's a great question, and one I can't really answer at this time. Obviously our goal long- o ur goal long term is to address the market as broadly as we can.
Sounds good. In response to, I think, Ric's question, you mentioned other consumer devices potentially as part of the agreement. Just broadly, is it feasible for the Iridium technology to be embedded in a device as small as a smartwatch?
Yeah. First of all, this development agreement doesn't cover anything but smartphones, as you can read in the 8-K, but...
Okay.
...it doesn't preclude us addressing other applications and other devices. You know, while I can't say definitively because we have not tested it specifically yet, that's still to come. It would be the physics seem to suggest with the right antenna, et cetera, and, you know, with the integration that we see in smartwatches, that yes, our technology is coming from a LEO orbit, using L-band, and technology we're aware of would be able to address smartwatches and other very small applications. Really, if it's in a smart enough chip and the rest of the components allow it, you know, at obviously a low data rate, you can make a connection with us. The nice thing is they don't have to build a new network to do it either.
Right. In terms of the term service provider agreement, you already have service provider agreements with Garmin, ZOLEO and other partners such that they pay you either a wholesale rate per message, per byte or per month, and then, the service provider actually charges their end customers whatever economic arrangement they set, right?
Yeah, that's right. I mean, that's how we go to market. I mean, obviously as a wholesale supplier, we don't, we really don't develop retail, you know, prices and we don't deliver the market to end consumers. We always go to market through what we call a service provider agreement. Doing so in this kind of area would require the same thing. You know, it's an arrangement by which how is it that we would price what it is that we would be delivering and on what terms? That's just the natural evolution. We do it all the time. We just have to do it in this case as well.
Excellent. Thanks, Matt, Tom, and Ken.
Okay. Thanks, Louie.
Thanks, Louie.
Our last question will come from Chris Quilty with Quilty Analytics. You may now go ahead.
Thanks. Matt, can you give us the first letter of the name ?
That's an appropriate final question anyway. How about the second letter? Chris, thank you.
Second letter? You just didn't think somebody could come up with an original way to ask the question, right?
No, you can do better.
Actually, I did have a legitimate technology question. One of the reasons you've been so successful integrating with Garmin and GPS devices is because the location of your spectrum and its adjacency to GPS signals and the ability to integrate with internal antennas. From a technical perspective, as you look at smartphones to have the same ability as sort of the existing hardware, their chipsets or antennas, which are kind of the two critical components for you to work with another device, or does a device manufacturer more likely than not have to do some significant or even minor hardware adjustments to the existing?
Yeah, that goes into a little bit too much detail, Chris. It was a good try, though.
It was a technical question.
It is a technical question. I would just say that this is something because, as you recognize, because I've been talking about this for the last, you know, three quarters or so at least, you know. There's been a lot of work done at this point, and we feel confident that, you know, you can make a connection, a usable connection between smartphones and low-Earth-orbiting satellites. Obviously, that shouldn't be a total surprise based on sort of a lot of others who would love to be in this market as well. By the way, I really do expect this will not be something exclusive to Iridium.
I mean, others will want to be in this market, but it's such a huge market that if you can address it in multiple ways, there's a lot of opportunities to build a new network to support this, which I don't know if that will occur, but some expect to try or even use other existing technologies. You know, what I feel good about is, you know, with a truly global network and one in which is a very flexible system that's demonstrated over many years to be very adaptable and with sort of, you know, the physics are really pretty good about this right now. It obviously won't be a stuck device, but, you know, I think the changes obviously must be manageable because they look very promising.
I'll just ask a couple real quick questions. Commercial broadband ARPU has been marching up, but you have some mix change in the future products. You know, Tom, should we generally expect the ARPU, given your expectation of product shipments to kind of trend up or flat or down, just generically?
The Certus 100, right? That's gonna go into commercial voice and data, and that should be accretive to those ARPUs obviously, right? Because it's more data used. We think in Broadband, the addition of additional Certus and the replacement of the, you know, legacy product OpenPort should be accretive to those ARPUs as well.
A lot of movers, you know, in that whole Broadband area. There is higher ARPU applications coming in, like commercial aviation and some areas that we see, there are lower priced products like Certus 200 that might, you know, go into lower applications that might not have ever wanted as high as ARPU.
I think that there's a broad range of ARPUs, but obviously as we've moved up from sort of the traditional OpenPort lower speed stuff to higher speed stuff, that typically drives higher usage. I think we're gonna see broad-based, you know, continued, you know. I can't tell you exactly where the ARPUs will end up in that whole area, because it still seems to be fairly early in that whole stage. We like the trends we're seeing.
I know this doesn't really impact revenues, but your subs, your government subs have been kinda trending down, and you mentioned the Space Force transition. Do you see a resolution in that and, you know, that being a potential driver for equipment sales looking out over the next year?
Well, we've had a lot of positive discussions and know that it's a recognized issue. It is being worked to be addressed. It's complicated like anything, you know, within a complicated environment like the U.S. government. They see that they want to take more advantage of the contract that they have right now and just have to make some changes to ensure the incentives and other things internally sort of support that. They recognize that it's not really demand going down at all.
There's a lot of applications and there's some really big programs coming that could drive significant volumes, you know, depending upon their success and how fast they roll out and that sort of thing. You know, we're still very bullish long term on our relationship through this contract and through, you know, eventually another contract out in the future on sort of our core business as well as, you know, continued growth in Broadband and, you know, other applications as well.
Big demonstration coming out sort of in Asia this summer. I'm excited to sort of showcase the applications. It's really a broad-based set of applications that potentially support them as well as many other allies and everything. You know, it's still a very long-term strategic relationship, just not showing up in subscriber numbers. But fortunately, we have the right contractual environment that it really doesn't sort of affect the revenue numbers much.
Are you still discussing a separate service contract, and is that something we should expect in the short to medium term?
We really. It's not a specific. It, the service will be delivered separately through a number of partners. We've signed up now- I forget, six or so, around six, somewhere between five and seven, of our partners, who are now going after sort of a number of different Broadband applications, some of which we've already seen come through on our commercial gateway. You know, as the government gateway, they'll be increasingly coming through the government gateway.
But those will really be per terminal, per pricing kind of applications, as it goes, you know. You'll see government broadband revenues, I think grow over the coming years here and add to our Broadband revenues that way. But it's not gonna be like a contract for a specific thing with the government. It won't be directly from us to the government, but we'll go through those designated government service partners.
Gotcha. Right now, anytime you do international business, it flows through your commercial line because that's where your partners operate through. You're saying any service business, at least for now, the way the business is running, is also DoD would flow through the commercial line and those partners?
Yeah, that's correct. It goes through our commercial broadband revenue line.
I do have one other clarification question on the handset thing. In the 8-K disclosure, it had indicated that there's some reimbursement for expenses. Are we to assume that it's on a P&L basis, it sort of looks like revenue goes up and R&D goes up and they offset?
Are you talking about the SDA?
No, this is for the handset.
The 8-K.
Oh. Oh, oh.
The 8-K.
That's gonna be. That'll be in engineering and support revenues and engineering and support costs. That's the line. They are the lines that will be affected by what the 8-K references.
Understand. Okay, great. Appreciate the color and congrats on a great quarter.
Sure.
Thanks, Chris.
Appreciate it.
This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to management for any closing remarks.
It has been an action-packed quarter. We appreciate that. It's great to be in a good environment. We really are enjoying some strong demand and love the opportunities we're working on and we'll keep you updated on the progress of those accelerators as we've described them as. Appreciate you being on the call and see you in the third quarter. Thanks.
The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.