Oh, good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the EchoStar Corporation conference call for third quarter 2022 results. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Terry Brown. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to our earnings call for the third quarter of 2022. I'm joined today by Hamid Akhavan, our CEO and President, Pradman Kaul, President of Hughes, Dean Manson, General Counsel and Secretary, and Muhammad Ali Butt, our Chief Accounting Officer. As usual, we invite media to participate in a listen-only mode on the call and ask that you not identify participants or their firms in your report. We also do not allow audio recording, which we ask that you respect. Let me now turn the call over to Dean for the Safe Harbor disclosure.
Thanks, Terry. All statements we make during this call, other than statements of historical fact, constitute forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provided by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause our actual results to be materially different from historical results and from any future results expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. For a list of those factors and risks, please refer to our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021, filed on February 23, and our subsequent filings made with the SEC. All cautionary statements we make during the call should be understood as being applicable to any forward-looking statements we make wherever they appear.
You should carefully consider the risks described in our reports and should not place any undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. We assume no responsibility for updating any forward-looking statements. Now I'll turn the call over to Hamid.
Thank you, Dean, and good day, everyone. As some of you are aware, David Rayner retired as our chief operating officer and chief financial officer in early October, and we would like to thank him for his many contributions and wish him well in the future. An executive search for his replacement is underway, and we will keep you informed on our progress. As for our agenda for the call today, first, we will provide a brief overview of financial and operational activity from the third quarter. After that, I will provide an update on our business strategy, and we'll then move to question-and-answer session. Let's start with our financials. Our revenue in the third quarter of 2022 was $497 million. That is down $7 million compared to the same period last year.
Though on a year-to-date basis, we have achieved $11 million of growth. The decline in the third quarter was primarily due to net result of lower U.S. consumer revenues and the negative impact of $4 million from foreign currency exchange, which was partially offset by the growth in revenues in our enterprise business. Our adjusted EBITDA in the quarter was $159 million, a decrease of 15% from last year, primarily due to the shift in revenue mix from consumer to enterprise, but also increased customer care and material costs, which we hope will be mitigated as inflationary pressures subside. In the third quarter, we saw continued momentum in our enterprise business with $174 million of new orders. That's up 111% from third quarter last year.
Our year-to-date 2022 orders are higher by 64% compared to the same period last year. We remain excited about opportunities within the enterprise market. This is an extremely large addressable market, one that will continue to allow us to better diversify our business, both domestically and internationally, which is a key component of our strategy. Although gross margin in this market segment is lower than our consumer segment, the capital investment in it is minimal, and scaling this business unit will amplify its profitability through higher operating leverage. We intend to take the necessary measures regarding our fixed costs in line with the change in revenue mix to preserve our ability to generate cash. Capital expenditures in the quarter were $61 million, compared to $90 million in quarter three of last year.
The decrease was primarily due to lower spend on JUPITER 3 satellite program and consumer premise equipment. Free cash flow, defined as adjusted EBITDA minus CapEx, was $97 million during the quarter and is $243 million year to date through September 30, 2022. We ended the quarter with $1.6 billion of cash and marketable securities. Our cash balance positions us well, given the uncertainty of current economic conditions. It affords us the flexibility to explore investment opportunities that could foster growth, which is part of our business strategy. For our last earnings call, I shared with you our strategic course. This methodical undertaking is designed to both improve our financial and competitive position, as well as to capitalize on short- and long-term growth opportunities, both organic and inorganic. We are pursuing three parallel work streams that I call Horizons.
In Horizon one, we are optimizing use of our existing assets and services until we bring JUPITER 3 into service. We are focused on capacity yield instead of subscriber growth and continue regearing our service offers to optimally manage churn. For instance, we launched the HughesNet Fusion service, which we expect to help reduce consumer churn in the U.S. while opening potential enterprise opportunities internationally. We recently optimized the staffing for better alignment around our strategic initiatives as well as to lower unproductive operating expenses. We'll continue to manage our operating expenses in correlation with our revenue trend and profile to preserve our bottom-line performance. Let me now turn it over to Pradman, who will provide some additional specifics on the quarter and Horizon one activities.
Thank you, Hamid. In our continued effort to optimize our current products and services, our team continues to focus on improving our North American consumer offering and customer satisfaction. You'll recall that we began rolling out our new HughesNet service plans earlier this year, with 50% more data per plan. These are being well received by customers, and our ARPU remains strong, increasing from the prior quarter. We continue to optimize capacity allocations to yield the best performance possible from our satellite fleet. This past quarter, as Hamid mentioned, we launched our HughesNet Fusion plans to customers in select U.S. markets, and the early reaction has been overwhelmingly positive, meeting or exceeding our expectations. HughesNet Fusion combines our GEO satellite service with wireless service for a low-latency internet experience that's responsive, reliable, and fast.
After a successful launch of customers in the Southeast, we expanded availability to new customers in that region and have slowly began with making it available to other markets across the U.S. with great response. By early December, HughesNet Fusion plans will be available nationwide. Moving to our North American enterprise business. In the third quarter, we secured a $37 million contract with a financial services company to upgrade their networking equipment and extend their SD-WAN network service until 2028. A $4.4 million order from a leading retailer for an equipment upgrade and extension of their Hughes-provided SD-WAN network. A contract with a new quick-service restaurant chain for their corporate stores covering network equipment and services, and additional contracts and deployments for customers in the retail, petroleum, and energy markets. In our OneWeb program, we continued delivery of production gateways and systems as planned.
We've shipped 26 gateways so far and expect to complete all gateways in 2023. We've started production of the satellite subscriber modem modules for inclusion into OneWeb's terminals and have begun shipments. Also, we received a large purchase by OneWeb to purchase a significant volume of our electronically steerable antennas once they're available in 2023, as well as an additional large order for operational support services. Our defense group procured an award to provide another private 5G network deployment in an additional military base. In the civilian government market, the team won awards for several upgrades and service extensions for both federal and state agencies. Now to our international operations. As in the U.S., our priority in the Latin American market is to maximize yield on our capacity.
We signed an agreement with Itellum, a Costa Rican internet service provider, to utilize our Ka-band capacity to provide a premium internet service where fiber and terrestrial wireless services are not available. In addition, we're allocating additional Ka-band capacity to expand cellular backhaul services in Mexico. We remain focused on adding high-value subscribers through tactics such as selective screening and capacity-optimized pricing plans that are improving our ARPU. Our Brazilian enterprise business executed significant new orders in the third quarter, including additional equipment sales and an expansion of satellite services for two utility companies. We also won an order from a bank to expand the scope of our existing service agreement for their SD-WAN network.
New business with a major engineering company to provide managed satellite services across 2,000 sites, and won a major contract with a telecommunications company for operations and field maintenance of their payphone network. This project is notable as instead of providing connectivity services, we're leveraging our extensive field services infrastructure to provide this service. In India, cell backhaul continues to be a major opportunity. We have now over 1 Gb of capacity contracted to support 4G backhaul services in rural India. With over 1,500 sites deployed, we are well on our way to implementing the 10,000-site managed SD-WAN network for the Indian Oil Corporation. In terms of JUPITER System sales, we expanded deployments with existing customers, including Yahsat and SES. The launch of our JUPITER 3 satellite program continues to be on track for the first half of 2023.
The satellite is currently in final integration and then will begin dynamic testing as we test the satellite for a launch environment. We continue to work closely with Maxar to maintain the schedule. As previously noted, JUPITER 3 will add significant capacity to provide higher speed services in North and South America and presents a strong growth opportunity for our business in these regions. Let me now turn the call over to Hamid.
Thank you, Pradman. As you have discussed, the quarter and some of our Horizon one activities, let me provide an update on Horizon two and three of our strategy. Horizon two finds us focused on monetizing JUPITER 3, and the team is hard at work now planning not only for the launch itself, but for the service launch with new higher speed service plans. We'll also have a new Fusion offering with higher speed plans. We believe the market is eager for the kind of services we'll be offering, and we expect to have a highly competitive set of services to take to market once JUPITER 3 enters service. Horizon two includes a strong focus on our global enterprise business, where we will leverage our business connectivity, managed services portfolio, hybrid LEO/GEO business solutions, and our own manufactured products.
Increased participation in this vast market segment is a key element of our diversification strategy. Horizon two is also about improving operational scale with potentially small acquisitions, which we are exploring at this time. This brings us to Horizon three. For this longer term strategy, we are actively evaluating opportunities for new avenues of organic and inorganic growth, including commercialization of our S-band assets and potential larger scale M&A opportunities. We will share more details on our efforts and plans as plans solidify. I remain extremely excited about our strengths, including our strong balance sheet, our global presence and trusted reputation, our engineering expertise, and our S-band spectrum assets. Let me now turn it over to the operator to start the question and answer session.
Thank you. At this time, we will conduct the question and answer session. As a reminder, to ask a question, you'll need to press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from the line of Ric Prentiss of Raymond James. Your line is now open.
Thanks. Good morning, everyone.
Morning, Ric.
A couple of questions.
Morning.
A couple of questions on my side. First, glad to see JUPITER 3 is still on track for a first half 2023 launch. I did see Xplore out of Canada mention they're expecting to offer Canadian service on that satellite in summer of 2023. Does it look like the launch and service date could still keep to maybe end of Q2, late June, July timeframe? I'm just trying to think of when that Horizon two, Hamid, that you talk about entering service, when should we think about that being? Is it summertime 2023?
You know, we can't be more specific than what we have mentioned, and we certainly cannot comment on anything that Xplornet may have mentioned. We leave the comments regarding their announcements to them. We are very much on track at the moment to launch our satellite in the first half of the year. You know, we have accounted for a good schedule. You know, we think that at this moment everything is on track. You know, we're not able to offer you any additional details, Ric, but we certainly expect that there will be a service offering post-launch in the second half of the year.
Okay. Can you give us a rough ballpark, maybe as far as how long from launch date, obviously through testing, but how long should it be as far as from launch to in service? Are we thinking it's less than three months?
You'd be happy to.
How fast a rise are you having?
Yeah. It takes several weeks, but you know, about seven or eight weeks to get the satellite up there. Let me ask Pradman to give you know, more specifics about JUPITER 3.
Yeah. I think it's typically in these systems. It takes us about 4 weeks to get the satellite debugged and tested. Not debugged, but tested fully so that we're confident it'll operate as we have specified it to operate. Probably another two to four weeks to put it into full service.
Okay, good. As we think about the different Horizons, is there a timeframe for when what's the definition of Horizon three longer term? Obviously Horizon one you're in right now, optimizing until J3 launches, and Horizon two is J3 launches, and you get it into service. How long a timeframe is it beyond Horizon two to say, "Here's what Horizon three envisions"? Is that a two to five-year plan? Is that a five to 10-year plan? What kind of is the ballpark timeframes of Horizon three?
Yeah. Great question. Let me start by reminding everyone that all three Horizons are being worked in parallel. The output of the effort on Horizons will appear in different timeframes. We are working Horizon three just as aggressively as we are working Horizon one and two. From that perspective, these are three streams of work activity with outputs that will be measurable and impacting our financials in different windows of time. The way we look at this, Ric, is Horizon three is about 2026 and beyond. You should be able to see. You know, that's our, you know, is it 2026 to 2026.5? Is it 2027? You know, 2026 is pretty much what we think.
We see the effort of what we're working now and, you know, give us a, you know, bit of latitude a couple of quarters back and forth. That's the window simply because, you know, it may happen sooner depending on, you know, if we find an acquisition target that we think would be synergistic and, you know, would be absolutely the right one to do. The impact of that may be sooner than 2026. To set the proper expectation, you know, we think that, you know, we need to have a business model that complements what we have today by 2026.
Okay. Another one from my side. Obviously stock buybacks are still out there, but it wasn't significant in 3Q. Was not very large in 2Q. You mentioned in Horizon two there might be some small M&A opportunities as well as you look at providing services to the customer base. How should we think about how you're viewing the strong balance sheet, the opportunity with the stock being basically trading at cash per share versus buying some other asset out there?
Commenting on share buyback. At the moment we're not actively purchasing shares. This is a deliberate decision to keep the cash on balance sheet, partly because of the market conditions that we're all experiencing, but also, we think this is the right decision for us in terms of the execution of our roadmap, as a strategic roadmap. We are proud of the fact that we have a very strong balance sheet and we have a, you know, accumulation of cash today. Cash is king more than ever, and we think that condition will continue. Positions us very well to execute the Horizons that we just talked about.
I don't think the acquisitions that we will be making in Horizon for the Horizon two impact would be so significant that that would significantly impact or deplete our cash position. Probably more of our cash position will be consumed and put to use for opportunities in Horizon three. Again, we are a cash-generating business. As you heard me and Pradman talk about this, we've generated a significant amount of cash this year, and we continue to optimize our fixed costs and optimize our operations in a way that as we transition our business from consumer to enterprise and growing our enterprise business, you know, the bottom line cash generation is a key focus. We will enhance our cash position.
We will use some of the cash as necessary to complement the Horizon two business we have. You should not expect that those acquisitions, if we make them, would substantially and vastly different. It would just give us more competitive posture for execution. For Horizon three, obviously, we are hoping and working on, you know, significant additional M&A.
Last one from me, and I'll turn it over to some other folks. Hamid , you've been now in the seat for seven months. Obviously, you've come in during a very difficult macro environment, as you just talked about. You do have a significant cash position, no net debt. When we think of the equity and where the stock is trading, what do you think you can do to help move the equity along? What, what's kind of on your list of things to say, "Here's what I think I can put in place or communicate," or what are you looking at as far as how to get the catalyst going to get the stock moving in the other direction?
Right. I mentioned a couple things. One is that I think the strategic framework that we have put in place is the right one. Obviously, we have debated it, we've discussed it, we have shared with our board and sought views and opinions of other experts in the industry. We think we're heading in the right direction in terms of our thinking of how to develop the business for long-term indefinite sustainability and growth. Having said that, I also wanna say that we don't wanna be rash, we wanna be patient.
You know, we don't want to raise the share price just to have it come down based on some announcements and based on some, you know, very short-term oriented tactical moves that, you know, raises the share price and then, you know, and after that, you know, it precipitates again. That has not been the approach that this business has taken and is not the approach we'll be taking going forward. Look, we are at a point where we believe this is an absolute rock bottom, and I think we're trading at levels that nobody has ever seen in any other industry. We wanna be patient to some degree.
We wanna make sure that when we execute our Horizons strategy, we do it in a sustainable way that the share price, you know, obviously goes to full value, full potential and beyond, in a way that you can count on it being in there. Obviously, I understand the market expects me and expects us to move things. For the kind of movement we're talking about creating, you don't wanna make a mistake. You don't wanna go ahead and you know, for instance, I would not look at some of the M&A that is happening in our space in terms of, you know, creating larger scale in the same space, you know, mergers in the same space. If it doesn't diversify the business, I wouldn't do it.
We are very prudent about our thinking of, you know, long-term orientation of the business. Long way of saying, I'd like to share, it is my goal, it is our intent with, you know, our absolute focus to raise shareholder value and share price. But we wanna do it the right way, and we resist the pressure to do something for the sake of just being active. There's a delicate balance, we understand it, but we're very focused on it.
Okay. Very good. Look forward to more details as they come forward. Thanks.
Thank you for questions.
One moment for our next question. Okay, our next question comes from the line of Michael Rollins of Citi. Your line is now open.
Thanks and good morning. Just curious if you can give us an update on the competitive landscape in the consumer segment. You know, what are you seeing in terms of, you know, where fiber may be built in the future, what you're seeing currently in terms of fixed wireless, as well as other competitive alternatives that your customers may have. Thanks.
Sure. Look, some of the competitive dynamics you're fully aware of. You're aware that, you know, obviously Starlink has been in the market now for almost a year. Starlink has grown. Well, while they have created some new segments for themselves, they've also impacted our business to some degree. You've seen it in our consumer numbers. I wanna say that we are not really focused on just maximizing the number of consumers. We are looking at maximizing yield. We, you know, may have less consumers now, but we have a growing ARPU. Our revenue per customer has grown on a, you know, quarter-over-quarter basis. We're keeping, you know, great customers.
Again, we're maximizing yield, so I don't think you should be focusing as we are not as focused on the number of customers more than you know what we get out of the consumer business, both domestically and internationally. Now, as it comes to fiber and fixed wireless. Look, fiber never made sense to go in every place. Obviously, with near zero interest rates and historically low interest rates, you know, for borrowing capital, the infrastructure deployment was unlimited. You know, you could go ahead and justify investments in places where the density of population was very low and the return on the investment was acceptable. With interest rates coming higher, I do expect that it slows down. I don't think fiber can go everywhere.
It couldn't, and now even less so today at the cost of borrowing for infrastructure deployment. I think the market is in a long way of saying, as self-serving as it may sound, I think the market is coming our way. We remain confident that there's about 15 million homes just in the United States that we think are underserved from a broadband perspective. We think when JUPITER 3 shows up, we have more than double our capacity of what we have had to date. We are looking at, you know, 50 Mbps and 100 Mbps speeds with Fusion, you know, helping with the latency and reliability and, you know, unlimited plans that the team is working on in Horizon two.
You know, we think our position in the marketplace will be very strong and the market is coming more our way than running away from us. You know, we're not blind to the competition, but we feel that we are actually gearing up to improve our position going forward.
Thank you.
Thank you. Please stand by for our next question, please. Our next question comes from the line of Chris Quilty from Quilty Analytics LLC. Your line is now open.
Thanks. You have to excuse me, I didn't get through the full 10-Q, but the EBITDA margins in the Hughes business were the lowest they've hit in about 10 quarters. Were there specific incremental costs in the quarter, and how do we look at some of the pre-JUPITER 3 rollout costs and the impact on margins over the next couple quarters?
Yes, be happy to comment on that. Yes, the EBITDA margin has come down. Like, it's been primarily due to the shift in mix from consumer to enterprise. I'll comment on that a bit more in a second. There's also been some inflationary pressures as the cost of customer care and some of the material costs have come up. Obviously those things all add up.
We think that both those other costs are transient. They will be as the inflation subsides, I think those costs will go back to more historical terms, and I think we're gonna recover some of that margin. The shift in revenue from consumer to enterprise obviously comes at a, which has a lower margin, you know, will impact our EBITDA. On the other hand, you have to know that when you go below EBITDA, the enterprise business doesn't have as much CapEx. It has some lower costs in terms of you know general services that are not on the gross margin. So CapEx, the CapEx will be the biggest impact here for the enterprise business having less you know less drag than the consumer.
You know, if you look at a transition of consumer to enterprise business, you know, as you have seen our enterprise business is growing at a very rapid rate, probably one of the fastest years we have had in terms of growth. You could see that as that business grows, if it grows at the scale that we have been selling, you know, it can, with adjustments in our cost structure for that business, it can replenish the loss of, you know, profit, net profit, that ultimately comes from the from shrinkage of the consumer business. We actually like the enterprise business. We think it's gonna scale faster. We think we can do that. I think we can diversify using the enterprise business, which has a very large TAM to account for that.
In the short term, obviously you will see some EBITDA shrinkage as we are in the midst of that transition. I hope that answers. I mean, I blended a number of things. I answered your question, but I also wanted to make sure that we're just not looking at EBITDA margin, we're also looking at the net, you know, net income at the bottom.
Right. I think the consumer business consumes around $40 million or $50 million a quarter in CapEx just for the CPE-related piece. Is that correct?
I don't have that. I'm not sure you have that number at hand.
Yeah. Chris, this is Terry. I think that's relatively in the ballpark. I can follow up with you on that to double-check it.
Gotcha.
Yeah.
Obviously on the enterprise.
I think the consumer CPE. Yeah. Go ahead, please.
I was gonna say, on the enterprise business, that's not a CapEx cost, it's a hardware revenue.
Well, our enterprise business has a number of factors in it. Our enterprise business is not pure connectivity. We have a lot of services in enterprise business. We have manufacturing in the enterprise business. As some of the, you know, we have enterprise as services. Pradman referred to a number of deals that he has mentioned. You know, so the connectivity piece obviously does include, you know, CapEx for equipment, but not for the services and, you know, for the manufacturing, we generally recover the cost for material, you know, pretty quickly, and it's not capitalized.
Gotcha. Just to circle back on what we call the enterprise business. If we put aside the Hughes gateway business, you know, that business had been sort of a slow bleed for several years, you know, no growth or shrinking slightly. It looks like in the past year or two, put COVID aside, you've actually started to see organic growth in that business. You know, again, the traditional business was sort of hooking up lottery terminals and gas stations. How do you see the growth of the enterprise market aside from acquisitions on a go-forward basis, and what contributes to the growth of that business? Is it just, you know, underlying satellite capacity is so much better, or is it more the managed services you're layering on top?
I think the.
Yes. Sorry.
Pradman, please go ahead.
Yeah, thanks. I think the enterprise business consists of two parts, right? It's the services part and the product delivery part. There's a significant amount of the business that we actually ship both VSATs and gateways for building networks for different operators all over the world. I think one of the items that has accelerated that is the technology of Jupiter 3. That's become the de facto standard pretty much all over the world. So we've had large volume sales in that area, just plain product sales in countries like Indonesia, Europe, India, Brazil. That has contributed very nicely to both our new order input and our backlog.
If you look at some real big system jobs that we have won, OneWeb, for example, is a huge job where we're not only supplying gateways, we're supplying terminals, we're supplying services, and they have come alive in the last three to five years, three to four years. It's a good part of our strategy. The one thing, of course, as you noted, is the margins are much lower, as Hamid mentioned earlier. You don't get the margins that you get in pure in the pure service business, the gross margins. Then you take it all the way down to net income, and the difference is not as significant as it is by itself as a service opportunity.
Right.
Did I answer your question?
Yeah. Yeah, I think that gets us closer to the answer. If I were to switch final subject, OneWeb launching again. If we assume that they are, you know, full-service launch sometime next year, hopefully, you know, mid-year or something, what does that do to your business and specifically your business in India? And can you remind us, is that an exclusive distribution?
Yeah. We have an exclusive distribution agreement in India with OneWeb. That's, you know, it's gonna make us very powerful in India, because not only will we have the existing KU and KA business, but we'll also have the LEO business with OneWeb. We'll be able to implement our GEO-LEO strategy in a much more significant way. Very excited about it. You know, the whole satellite market in India is just beginning to take off. They launched the last constellation of 36 satellites on an Indian rocket very successfully. The whole Indian telecom business structure is excited, and we hope to participate in that excitement and in this business growth there.
Great. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Ric Prentiss of Raymond James. Your line is now open.
Yeah, thanks for taking the follow-up. Seems like we had some open time. I mean, I think one of the top questions we get from investors is S-band. You touched on it briefly. I wanna make sure if it didn't come up on other questions, that it came up, that that's in Horizon three. But I think investors are trying to figure out how should they think about this raw asset that you've put together there? How should we think about what your thoughts are, what the potential for partnering is, or what the potential timeline for information to the street on what you're gonna do with the S-band? Can you frame us any more color on S-band? How should we be thinking about it, developing that raw asset and information into the street?
Yes, that's a great question. The S-band story has evolved for the world, not just for EchoStar. If you think about it, all the way till about, I don't know, a year ago or so, there was no standardization around connectivity to the satellite from direct-to-device, from handsets, from 5G NTN as it's called. The business model for S-band would have been less exciting, significantly smaller, perhaps not even exciting in many ways, given the cost of the, you know, launch and maintenance of a, you know, a LEO system for specialized devices. As the 5G NTN standardization has happened, that restriction, that limitation has been removed. In fact, now it looks very exciting.
If you could just come to the devices, the consumer devices that are just normal devices that consumers have in their pockets, it's exciting from the perspective of the end customer base perspective. They, you know, they use their normal device. They don't carry a specialized device. They don't have to have a second device. Also, it's very exciting from a perspective of the supplier and provider of the service, where you don't have to subsidize, you don't have to design, develop, manufacture, distribute the specialized terminals. The game has changed. Remember, that game has only changed in the past 12 months. That game, that's a new game. Now, if one wants to bring a service based on 5G NTN to the market, it requires the ecosystem of the 5G NTN.
I just mentioned that the devices would have to come from the device manufacturers, and they would have to be sold and populated in the market. We are still a couple of three years away from those devices being in significant proliferation, right? I mean, the standard is just set. It will take a couple of years for the, you know, chipsets to be manufactured, to the chipsets to make it to the terminals and terminals to be populated through sales. I mean, the existing devices will not work. You need the next generation hardware. When you look at all that kinda drives the timing, and you have an element of ecosystem. No player, no single player in the market can walk in and say, "I have it all." There's no single player.
Doesn't matter who you look at, handset manufacturer, satellite manufacturer, service provider, carrier, operator. You can't. None. It will require the collaboration and partnership of a number of players to make that work. That's why it takes time, and that's why it also is not prudent to make announcements unilaterally when you don't have all of the elements that is required to develop that ecosystem and all the agreements and financials in place for it to become a reality. That's why you're not gonna hear from us any sort of premature announcements, any announcements that will just give you one angle of the picture, but not the full picture. Having said that, I wanna mention that we are very focused on it. We understand the opportunity.
We understand the size of the market perhaps better than anybody else, given that we have manufactured terminals for almost every satellite manufacturer and provider out there. We have been in satellite to handset connectivity in Europe, in our EML, European Mobile Business. We've done that. We're doing it today to specialize devices in LoRa. You know, we understand the space, but we don't wanna come in with premature information releases, which is not helpful neither for investors nor for our ultimate customers. I hope that answers your question to some degree.
Yeah, no, that's you know 'cause there's been a lot of other announcements out there. Apple with Globalstar, Iridium with an unnamed partner, T-Mobile with SpaceX Starlink. There's a lot happening in the communication world and with satellite companies. My interpretation is, suffice it to say, you're in talks, discussions, you know what's happening out there and you're not on the sidelines. You're just not ready to put it on the field.
Well, no, I would say that's fair conclusion. If I were sitting on the other side, that would be my conclusion. I would also say the announcements made today are not game changers. We're not seeing any of those announcements as the ultimate answer here. None of those are based on 5G. None of those are based on a greater service or product breadth that we think would change the behavior or the economics of the industry. We think, you know, the real solution of direct to handset would have to bring capabilities similar to what people use today on a normal basis.
They should be able to make voice calls, data calls, and, you know, just a pure emergency messaging or, you know, provide limited service over a small geography, which we don't even think it's viable commercially to build a whole new ecosystem to provide, you know, patchwork of coverage in one country or another. We just don't think those things are, first of all viable, or game changers. Also, we think that, you know, nobody is ahead of anybody else when it comes to providing a 5G based system, which we believe we continue to believe is the right answer.
That's very helpful. Thanks.
At this time, I'm showing no further questions, so I'd now like to turn it back to Terry Brown for closing remarks.
Okay, thank you everybody for joining the call today, and we look forward to talking to you at our next call.
Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.