Good morning. I am Bob Neehausen. I'm the chairman of the board of Iridium Communications, Inc. I'm very happy to welcome you to the Iridium Communications twenty twenty one stockholders meeting. We hope that each of you is staying safe and well.
As a part of our ongoing precautions regarding COVID-nineteen based on the great turnout we had last year, our Annual Stockholders Meeting is once again being held virtually this year. We are joined today by each of our nominees for the Board, our Executive Officers and some of our advisors, including Ernst and Young Cooley, our outside counsel. Before we get started with the business at hand, I will ask Kathy Morgan, our Assistant Secretary, to run through a few logistics.
Thanks, Bob, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us. If you're logged in today as a stockholder, you will see sections on your screen for voting and also for submitting questions. After we've concluded the business of the annual meeting, our CEO and Board member, Matt Desch, will make a short presentation and will then respond to appropriate stockholder questions. Please send questions in now and time permitting, we will address them on our call today.
Questions received, even as we don't have time to address this morning, they'll be posted on the Investor Relations section of our website for review by early next week. With that, I will turn things over to Bob.
The meeting will now officially come to order. We will proceed with the formal business of the meeting as set forth in your notice of annual meeting and proxy statement. Will the secretary please report at this time with respect to the mailing of the notice of meeting and the stockholders' list?
Mr. Chairman, I have at this meeting a complete list of the stockholders of record of the company's common stock at the close of business on 03/15/2021, the record date for this meeting. I also have an affidavit certifying that on 04/01/2021, a notice of annual meeting of stockholders of the company was deposited in The United States mail to all stockholders of record at the close of business on 03/15/2021.
At this time, I'd like to introduce Christelle Pauley of American Election Services LLC, who is also on the line, has been appointed to act as inspector of election of this meeting. Ms. Pauley has taken and subscribed the customary oath of office to execute her duties with strict impartiality. We will file this oath for the records of the meeting. Her function is to decide upon the qualification of voters, accept their votes, and when validating on all matters is completed, to tally the final votes.
Will the secretary please report at this time with respect to the existence of a quorum.
Mister chairman, I've been informed by the inspector of election that proxies have been received for 123,813,782 of the 134,111,085 shares of common stock outstanding on the record date, which represents approximately 92.3% of the total number of outstanding shares. This constitutes a quorum for the meeting today, and we may now carry out the official business of the meeting.
We will now proceed with the formal business of this meeting. There are three proposals to be considered by the stockholders of this meeting. The secretary will now describe the voting procedures.
The time is now 08:32AM on Wednesday, 05/12/2021, and the polls are open for voting on all matters to be presented. Any stockholder who has not had voted or wishes to change their vote may do so by clicking the voting button displayed on their screen and following the instructions shown. Stockholders who do not want to change their vote do not need to take any further action. The polls will be closed to voting after we go through the matters to be voted on.
The first item of business is the election of 13 directors to serve until the twenty twenty two annual meeting and until their successors are elected. The nominees for directors are set forth in our proxy statement and are as follows. Myself, Robert H. Newhouse, Thomas C. Camfield, Matthew J.
Desch, who is also our CEO, Thomas J. Fitzpatrick, who is also our Chief Financial Officer, L. Anthony Frazier, Jane L. Harmon, Alvin B. Cromgaard, Suzanne E.
McBride, who is also our Chief Operating Officer, Admiral Eric T. Olson, retired, Steven B. Pfeiffer, Parker W. Rush, Henry O. Schleman, and Barry J.
West. The second line of business, sorry, the second item of business today is the advisory vote on the executive compensation of the company's named executive officers as disclosed in the proxy statement. The stockholders have been asked to vote on an advisory basis on the following resolution. Resolved, that the compensation paid to the company's named executive officers as disclosed pursuant to compensation disclosure rules of the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the compensation discussion and analysis, compensation tables, and any related information disclosed in this proxy statement is hereby approved. The third and final item of business today is the ratification of the selection by the Board of Directors of Ernst and Young LLP as the independent registered public accounting firm of the company for the fiscal year ending 12/31/2021.
That was the final proposal for today's meeting. The secretary will now close the polls.
The polls are about to close. If you have not yet voted, please do so. The time is now 08:34AM, and the polls are now closed for voting.
May we now have the results of of the voting, mister secretary?
Mr. Chairman, the preliminary report of the Inspector of Election covering the proposals presented at this meeting is as follows. The proposal to elect 13 nominees as directors of the company is carried, with each director receiving votes from at least 96% of the shares voting. The resolution concerning the advisory vote on the compensation page of the company's named executive officers is approved with approximately 96.6% voting in favor, 3.3% opposed, and 0.12% abstaining. The appointment of Ernst and Young LLP as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year ending 12/31/2021 is ratified with approximately 98.4% voting in favor, 1.4% opposed, and 0.117% abstaining.
Thank you. A full tally of the final books will be published in a current report on Form eight k, which will be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission within four business days after today. This concludes the formal portion of today's meeting. This meeting is adjourned. I would like to thank you all for attending, and on behalf of everyone at Iridium, send you our wishes for your continued well-being.
I will now turn things over to Matt.
Well thanks Bob, and, welcome to everyone. Just before we conclude the meeting and have questions here, I'd like to just make a few remarks about 2020 and have a few charts to do that. First to really start this off I wanna recognize our board of directors, all of whom I believe are on a call right now and listening in. I wanna thank them for their, incredible service and welcome our newest board member, Tony Fraser, on this chart. We have a meeting later today and I certainly appreciate all of their service and they're a big part of why we have been so successful over this year.
There is a safe harbor forward looking statements here that you can read. These charts will be on our investor website. First of all, just a brief overview. Hopefully you all know about our company and the unique nature of the network and services that we provide completely to the planet. But we are in 2020 a company of total revenue of $583,000,000, which was up 4% actually even during a pandemic year over the previous year.
We serve over 1,500,000 customers as of the end of the first quarter, which, actually even then grew 14% year over year between 2020 and 2019. So obviously many people depend amongst around the world. And we go to market through over four fifty technology partners who take our technologies and put them into hundreds if not thousands of solutions. That global partner base continues to grow and grew last year and is a very important part of our success. Hard not to start with the most important thing, our very unique network which provides no compromise coverage of the total planet through 66 satellites in low earth orbit.
We utilize a very important frequency called L band which allows us to provide small antennas and very low latency. Our network is designed for extreme mobility and IOT is perfect for that and it's the reason why we continue to grow. You probably have heard of a lot of other satellite networks that have been launching over the last year or two. Those are exciting new opportunities with many other satellites in low earth orbit, but those are providing commodity broadband services which is not a service we provide or intend to. And in fact we find ourselves complementing those networks very well and being utilized to perform a very, very different function for customers.
Of course we have a brand new network and it's going to be, gonna provide us a long term service. And even though we have a new network, are the most experienced really satellite operator in LEO. We addressed a number of important markets. These five kind of summarize what we do. We of course started in land, mobile, and maritime through satellite phones and phones on vessels of all types.
Expanded many years ago into aviation or important part of the cockpit of commercial airliners, as well as rotorcraft, general aviation, and corporate aircraft. Our fastest growing market is in the Internet of Things, connecting things all over the planet. And of course we have a very unique relationship and service to the US government which is an important part of our revenues. I just wanted to highlight one area that particularly even in 2020, was outstanding. We now have well over a million commercial IoT subscribers.
In fact we just passed through that number. An increasing number of those, 40% of them now are consumer communications. And of course our network is perfect for that through very small devices, that can, allow people anywhere on the planet to make an important connection no matter where they are. An increasing number of companies are doing it. Of course Garmin is the largest but many others are now into the space.
And, I think this is an important area that will be a focal point for us, going forward and will be important places we become embedded in ever more things. We are at our core a cash flow story. Even as we went public back in 02/2009 with 134,000,000 in operational EBITDA, we've almost doubled that as we grew through 2020, averaging over that period around 9% in operational EBITDA growth. That was as we were building the whole Iridium NEXT network. And as you can see that CapEx mountain has ended and we've entered a period of a CapEx holiday.
So operationally EBITDA growth growing means and with falling net leverage means we're going to continue to have growing free cash flow, which is important part of our story. So as an investment, you know, with this CapEx holiday and strong cash flow conversion rates, as we allocate capital and get down into our net leverage range. In fact, we've already started returning capital to shareholders in the first And if you look at our financial statements, you'll see that we've already, in terms of share buybacks and other things, we believe will particularly over the next five to ten years, we'll be returning significant capital returns to our shareholders. And of course, market has appreciated that even during 2020 while we, like everyone else, had a bit of a surprise back in March of twenty twenty. And, as our partner stopped operating, they quickly got back into business and got our business growing again and our stock reflected the resiliency really of our system and the place where we are really in our life cycle.
And our stock appreciated 60% in 2020, which we appreciate and I think you do too. So with that, I hope that gives you a quick overview. We really believe we have a bright future. I wanna highlight the fact that we have an Investor Day coming up in two weeks on May 26, where we'll provide a kind of a view into the future about our belief about the next sort of five year and the incredible opportunity that's available to us as we continue to execute on this business model and get the full value of our really unique and important network. So thank you for your time today on the call.
And with that, if there's any questions, I'd be glad to answer them. If not, I will see you at the Investor Day. So I'll turn it back over to Kathy.
Thanks, Matt. We actually have not received any questions today. So I think we can just say thanks to everyone for attending. And appreciate you all taking your time to be with us today.
Thank you. Bye.