Good day. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the EchoStar Corporation conference call for fourth 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 hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Terry Brown. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good day, everybody, welcome to our earnings call for the fourth quarter of 2022. I'm joined today by Hamid Akhavan, our CEO and President, Paul Gaske, our Chief Operating Officer, Dean Manson, our Chief Legal Officer, and Jeffrey Boggs, our interim 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.
Thank you, 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 31st, 2022, filed yesterday 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. We refer to adjusted EBITDA during this call. The comparable GAAP measure and reconciliation thereto are presented in our earnings release. I'll now turn the call over to Hamid.
Thank you, Dean. Good day, everyone. We have had an exciting fourth quarter. In December 2022, Pradman Kaul announced his retirement. We would like to thank him for his 50 years of service. This announcement signaled the start of a new era as we align the company for success in a changing industry. As of January 1st, 2023, Paul Gaske assumed a new Chief Operating Officer role that was established to lead all market-facing global activities. Congratulations to you, Paul. We remain enthusiastic about our future. We believe that under a more streamlined management and operating structure, we will drive efficiency, synergies, and greater growth. We continue our search for a chief financial officer. We will keep you informed of our progress. As for our agenda for the call today, first, we will provide a brief overview of financial activities from the fourth quarter.
After that, we'll discuss our business strategy, which includes the three parallel work streams that are called Horizons and our progress on all three. We'll move to question-and-answer session. Let's start with our financials. Our revenue in the quarter on the fourth quarter of 2022 was $500 million, up slightly compared to the same period of prior year. On a full year basis, we achieved $12 million of growth. This in spite of the fact that for the full year of 2022, we faced competition from Starlink, which brought significant capacity to the market, and we did not have access to the benefits of our upcoming JUPITER 3 system. The revenue increase in the fourth quarter was primarily the result of growth in our enterprise business.
While our consumer broadband business has been impacted by capacity constraints and other factors, we have continued to increase revenue by capitalizing on enterprise and government opportunities, both domestically and internationally. This is consistent with my statements in prior earnings calls regarding our continued focus on diversification of the business. Our adjusted EBITDA in the fourth quarter was $164 million, an increase of 3% from last year, primarily driven by lower sales and marketing expense associated with our consumer broadband business. We continue to focus on managing our costs in line with the change in revenue mix to preserve our ability to generate cash. In the fourth quarter, we saw continued momentum in our enterprise business with $195 million of new orders. Our 2022 orders increased 41% compared to the same period last year.
Most enterprise orders are recognized over several years, creating a long and a stable revenue stream. We remain excited about opportunities within the enterprise market, the market that we believe will continue to allow us to better diversify our business both domestically and internationally, and provide cash generation through low capital investment and a scalable operating leverage. Capital expenditures in the quarter were $77 million compared to $86 million in Q4 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 $87 million during the quarter and $330 million in 2022. We ended the quarter with $1.7 billion of cash and marketable securities. This is post-purchasing approximately $90 million of our own stock in 2022.
I remain excited about the strength of our balance sheet as it affords us the flexibility to explore investment opportunities that could foster growth, which remains a key component of our business strategy. Let me now turn the call over to Paul, who will provide some additional specifics on the quarter and our Horizon 1 and Horizon 2 activities.
Thank you, Hamid. As a reminder, Horizon 1 is our near-term priority to maximize current services and operations while managing costs as we prepare for the launch of the JUPITER 3 EchoStar XXIV satellite. To that end, we continue to focus on operational efficiencies and yield optimization of our North America satellite capacity. In 2022, we restructured our portfolio of consumer service offerings to better align with market demand by provisioning additional capacity for our customers. We plan to continue to optimize our service plans in 2023 as we await the launch of the JUPITER 3 service. The changes in our service plans have resulted in a natural shift towards higher capacity, higher priced plans for our customers, improving our ARPU while delivering an enhanced customer experience. We remain focused on improving our cost structure through deployment of additional automation, improved processes and supply efficiencies.
Of course, without compromising the end user experience. In the third quarter of 2022, we launched Hughesnet Fusion, adding support for latency-sensitive applications to the traditional Hughesnet satellite service, which is optimized to support high-speed applications like video and downloads. Hughesnet Fusion utilizes a unique data-handling software to seamlessly combine our satellite service with a terrestrial wireless service, providing an exceptional internet experience that is responsive, reliable and fast. The Hughesnet service plans, the Hughesnet Fusion plans, have been well received by existing and new subscribers, and we expect the service to help attract new customers and reduce churn while improving ARPU. Although we continue to see competitive pressures within the underserved market we address, we believe the combination of our optimized service plans and Hughesnet Fusion service should help combat competition. Moving to our North America enterprise business.
In the fourth quarter, we signed a $9 million managed service contract with a new customer to utilize our secure broadband connectivity. We also received extensions from three retailers valued at approximately $5 million each, and continue to see success with contracts and deployments in the retail, petroleum and energy markets. In our OneWeb program, deliveries of production gateways continued as planned. As of the end of 2022, we have shipped 32 gateways and expect to complete the total complement of 44 gateways in 2023, in line with our committed schedule and customer expectations. Additionally, we have shipped more than 12,000 satellite subscriber modules for inclusion in OneWeb terminals. We also executed a contract to deliver 7x24 operational support for the OneWeb network that includes development of advanced AI management capabilities for the OneWeb ground infrastructure.
Our government business ended the year with record revenues. Although the business is still a relatively small scale, it has been growing through the development of network and security management tools for DoD applications and evolving technologies such as terrestrial and 5G NTN networks. As part of our streamlined management structure, we merged our defense and civil government business groups into one cohesive unit to drive efficiencies and expand opportunities for growth in the future. To our international operations. We continue to allocate additional capacity to address a wide range of enterprise applications to close the digital divide. In Mexico, we added broadband and cellular backhaul locations for CFE Telecom, as well as connectivity services to a major bank. In Colombia, we increased bandwidth to the 670 Antioquia schools.
In Brazil, we expanded the scope of our services agreement with a major telecommunications provider to deliver internet in approximately 1,600 rural schools. With regards to our Hughesnet service in Latin America, we remain focused on adding high value subscribers, which is lowering churn while optimizing yield on our existing Latin American capacity to increase profitability and cash generation. In terms of the JUPITER system equipment sales, we had significant orders from around the world. In Mexico, a major oil producer ordered an upgrade for their existing Hughes system and signed a multi-year support agreement. In Africa, a leading telecommunications service provider upgraded their JUPITER system to support network expansion and LTE backhaul connectivity. We also received a sizable order for BGAN terminals to support machine-to-machine communications.
In the Middle East, a telecommunications service provider ordered an additional redundant JUPITER gateway to enhance their service offerings. Let me focus on Horizon 2 activities. These include our efforts to bring JUPITER 3 into service for expansion of our service in North and South America, as well as growing and diversifying our global enterprise offerings. I'm pleased to report that the JUPITER 3 satellite is in the final stages of assembly and launch, which is expected to occur in the second quarter of 2023. As many of you know, in November 2022, we entered into an amended agreement with Maxar, the manufacturer of the satellite, to secure compensation for past delays and to realign remedies to incentivize Maxar to complete the program expeditiously.
The compensation provides for relief on approximately $14 million of payments through in-orbit raising and more than $44.5 Million+ interest on deferred in-orbit incentive payments. The amendment requires Maxar to pay liquidated damages in the event of further delays. Also, Maxar agreed to enter into an agreement with us where we will provide certain products or services to Maxar during 2023 for payments that will deliver us a margin of at least 30 basis points. In preparation for the launch of JUPITER 3, the team is focused on developing service plans with higher speeds, more data capacity, and the extension of our Hughesnet Fusion plan for the ultimate high, high speed, low latency satellite internet experience.
We believe the market is eager for these robust offerings, and we plan to have a highly competitive suite of services to meet a variety of our customers' needs once JUPITER 3 enters service. Horizon 2 also has a strong focus on our global enterprise business that includes the government sector. We plan to leverage our business connectivity, managed services portfolio, our hybrid LEO GEO business solutions, and our own manufactured products to pursue growth. Increased participation in this vast market segment is a key element of our diversification strategy, which includes improving our operational scale with potential small acquisitions, which we will continue to explore. Let me turn the call back over to Hamid.
Thank you, Paul. I would like to provide an update on Horizon 3, which is our strategy to expand into new markets around the world through both organic innovation as well as potential acquisitions. One significant area of progress is around our S-band opportunities. You probably saw a recent press release announcing our agreement with Astro Digital to begin construction of a global S-band mobile satellite service network. The 28-satellite LEO constellation is primarily targeting IoT services, which we believe is a vast untapped opportunity. The constellation will provide a commercial service that will provide us with a platform for ongoing market development and is a measured next step in terms of building our S-band license portfolio.
Some of you may recall that in the second quarter of 2021, we launched our third nanosatellite, known as EG3, with the primary mission to bring into use our SIRION-1 ITU filing. This mission was successfully completed in the third quarter of 2021. The satellite provided us with the ability to test a wide range of potential S-band applications and services, which we used in the design phase of our LEO constellation. During the 1st quarter of 2023, we lost contact with EG3 and are continuing efforts to reestablish communication. Regardless of the outcome, our LEO constellation satellites will substitute for EG3 in 2024, well in advance of the ITU required deadline in 2026. We have also been working to expand our LoRaWAN activities. LoRa, for long range, is a low-powered, wide area device connectivity or the Internet of Things.
Last year, we initiated hybrid S-band satellite and terrestrial LoRa services over the EchoStar XXI satellite in Europe to create the first Pan-European LoRa-enabled network. During the fourth quarter, we completed an initial commercial deployment of our hybrid S-band satellite and terrestrial LoRa services in Mexico, and we are currently testing similar services in the U.S. These activities will be supported shortly thereafter with our new LEO constellation. It is going to be a very exciting time for the LoRa and satellite IoT ecosystem as we aggressively drive satellite IoT capabilities forward globally. Regarding our 5G NTN activities, the LEO constellation will serve as a foundation for engineering 5G narrowband NTN-based capabilities building on 3GPP Release 17 and beyond.
We remain engaged with 5G NTN ecosystem partners at all levels of the value chain in support of our goal of engineering a truly transformative wideband LEO-based 5G NTN capability. For Horizon 3, in addition to our S-band activities, we are actively evaluating other opportunities for new avenues of organic and inorganic growth. We will share more details as all these efforts and plans solidify. Let me now turn it over to the operator to start the Q&A session.
As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from Ric Prentiss with Raymond James. Your line is now open.
Thanks. Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone.
Hi, Ric.
Hey.
Hi, Ric.
Hey, a couple questions. First, let's start with JUPITER 3. Glad to see the timing firming up here, that's in the final stages. Can you help us understand, have you got a launch date yet, and when do you think we should assume JUPITER 3 can go in service?
Yes. Well, Rick, yeah, we have made arrangements for launch. You know, we're not announcing the date at this time, but we have a launch set up on the SpaceX Falcon Heavy. With that, we were expecting Q3 to bring our services into market. The system we have is already been deployed in the United States. It's ready to go. The actual technology has been deployed in several customers already. We're very certain of our ability to rapidly deploy the network once we get the satellite.
Great. Similar question that I asked to one of your peers out there, how fast they think they would fill up their next generation satellite that they're launching. How fast do you think you'll, you'll be able to fill this bird up? I think it probably is what implies the difference between Horizon 2 and Horizon 3. When we think about capacity, I think we have about $1.3 million subs today. How should we think about what that added capacity of JUPITER 2, JUPITER 3 could be in relative terms?
Okay. Well, as far as the build time, you know, we're estimating about two to three years, which would be typical of what we've seen in the past. You know, we expect similar sorts of consumption of the capacity. As far as the actual sub numbers, I don't think we're prepared to give you a specific number. I think understand our plan with the capacity is to optimize our yield. It really goes in two dimensions. Growing subscribers, of course, is one dimension, but the other dimension, of course, is ARPU. As we improve these plans and improve the capabilities for the customers, you know, we've seen in the past that the customers are willing to pay more.
We would expect our overall revenue, which is our key objective here, and our yield from that capacity to be our main focus.
Okay. Then shifting gears, to the LEO project that you talked about. How did you come up with why 28 satellites in this constellation? How should investors think about what the capital commitment is over how many years to launch this LEO project?
Ric, the system was designed based on the original filing of our SIRION-1 application and rights. This design was already in the registration in the filing, and we're just completing that. But it does provide a complete coverage of the globe, even with several visitations per day, even in partial deployment, even from its very first start, or first launch, as it is launched in batches, and the very first one actually does provide complete coverage of the globe. As the additional satellites come on and, you know, that visitation rate increases. We think it's perfectly adequate and capable for the, you know, a wide range of IoT services and anything lower related and beyond.
In terms of the cost structure, you know, this is a, you know, second generation system for us and, you know, is a stepping stone towards our, you know, main goal and ambition to build a, you know, the leading wideband, perhaps the only wideband 5G NTN system to follow, which we have been working on. You should assume that this is a, you know, incremental capital expenditure, but certainly not at the level that would prevent us from being able to, you know, materialize our larger system.
I know, we have speculated maybe this 28 LEO satellite project could be something done for $100 million-$200 million total. Is that within the realm of reasonable or am I low there, high there?
I mean, you would be not too far from the ballpark. I think that those numbers are, you know, close to where our head is and our plan is.
It's good to be in the ballpark. The final question for me, obviously you mentioned that the 28 LEO satellite is a stepping stone. It's Generation 2, but not the ultimate wideband 1. Maybe give us a few of your thoughts, and it came up briefly on the DISH call earlier today. It's been a busy earnings day about direct to device. How do you view direct to device market, the satellite communications with smartphone linkage? That market seems ripe, but also seems early and somewhat confusing to investors out there. Can you walk us through a little bit about how you see direct to device opportunities?
First of all, we believe that direct to device is a fundamental opportunity. It's a very large opportunity, and I think it's a game-changing opportunity. We also believe that the very first initial steps of messaging only in a variety of, you know, qualities and capabilities is the initial step that is the, you know, that's probably smaller step, not fully activating all the capabilities which we think are exciting. A true wideband system which will have a natural use of your smartphone, similar to what you would use, on a, you know, terrestrial network, is what our ambitions are, and I think that's where the game-changing capability will come.
That is still, you know, a, you know, a few years away, but it's something that we are working on, and we believe that, you know, there's not room for too many of those out there. Certainly, I expect to be the leading provider of that capability. In the interim, obviously, there will be, you know, a messaging-based service device, and we are able to demonstrate it and work that today in some of our systems. I think you'll see some of those commercial offerings in the market in the near future.
Great. Thanks very much. That was so well.
Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from Chris Quilty with Quilty Analytics. Your line is now open.
Thank you, and congrats on finally moving forward with the S-band constellation. Now that it's out there, I got more detailed questions. Maybe just start with a couple of technical things in terms of what orbit you intend to use and will this system have cross links? When you think about the You know, there's existing competition out there's a lot of companies adding IoT constellations. Where do you see this fitting in terms of its capability? Obviously, it's distinct in that it's a LoRa based communications layer. You know, what eventually led you to that path versus another protocol?
Right. There are several questions in there, Chris, and I'll try to, you know, parse them. First of all, we have had quite a bit of experience with LoRa. We've been providing LoRa service over Europe for quite some time now. Now we are able to provide commercial service in Mexico. We are experimenting with LoRa, you know, over United States. We believe that just a narrowband IoT market in itself, you know, by end of this decade, will be more than $10 billion annually. There's quite a bit of room, and this is not even all the different applications and use cases that have been identified. I think that in itself is a very large market and has room for, you know, multiple operators to be there.
As I mentioned, you know, the way we, the capabilities of our system are, is specified in our filing in that we have made for SIRION-1. Some of those you can actually find in public domain. We've not disclosed anything more than what's in public domain regarding the capabilities of that system. You know, that's primarily for, you know, competitive reasons. We like to have that, you know, more guarded at this point. We think the system is quite capable of providing a superior, you know, IoT services. Now, having said that, We again consider this one a step, a significant step towards taking full advantage of our S-band spectrum capabilities, and that requires then building a much more capable system.
You know, with this step, we'll gain, you know, tremendous amount of knowledge about the performance of the 5G NTN. I mean, remember that this standard was just recently finalized. There's not been many or any system out there that's ever used it. We are an engineering company with, you know, deep, deep heritage and understanding of satellite systems and engineering links and capabilities. We wanna make sure that, you know, we have a system that we can absolutely perfect our understanding of the standards and remove any sort of limitations or bugs that may be there. To ensure that the big system that we are working on will ultimately be, you know, fully effective and maximally, you know, proficient.
That's the way we think about it, and we fully understand that others are also working on IoT. I think the market is large enough for all of that. Also, as I said, we are looking to step beyond that, and go to a wideband system.
Gotcha. How do you intend to go to market? direct, wholesale, partnerships?
Look, we're exploring all of those. At this point, we are not really giving any more specifics today. We are working in partnerships in the markets that I mentioned. Clearly, you know, for a larger system with, you know, different geographies, it, you know, it is our intention to maximize our access to market through multiple routes. You will see us probably, you know, take different approaches in different markets. Certainly, access to market has not been a limitation for us. You know, demand has been robust in terms of partnership and wanting to, you know, sell the services.
Gotcha. Just one question on the existing service. With the new Fusion product, is that a service that you'll offer even as JUPITER 3 comes out, you know, in the future and obviously has a lot more capability? Does Fusion still become necessary, or is Fusion a way for you to actually expand your addressable market? Because you can basically reserve some satellite capacity, use a little Fusion. Then the second question is: If, in fact, Fusion becomes a much bigger part of the mix on a go-forward basis, does it in any way impact, you know, the overall margin profile since you're reselling somebody else's service?
Well, okay. On the first question, you know, we see Fusion as a key new technology and service that augments what we already do today. If you look at our customer set, there's a lot of customers.
That the standard GEO services are a good fit, and we think that's the predominant number of them, as most of them, their applications have drifted over towards primarily streaming video and video applications. We see that high speed capability that the, say, JUPITER 3 would provide as primary support. If you look at the Fusion customers that have latency-sensitive applications, we see that as really the answer that allows them to get the benefits of both the GEO and the low latency terrestrial. What happens, I think, primarily for customers is that as we look at rolling this out further, we expect to get a fair amount of our market coverage there. We think it'll really be a good premium service for customers.
Great. Any material margin impact?
Well, that remains to be seen a little bit on the percentages. You know, obviously as we're buying capacity from other players, that is a lower margin than our utilizing our own assets. At the same time, there's limited capital investment we make to get that. That might tend to balance out.
Great.
If I may add also to that, look, we're expecting a significant churn improvement, and we have seen it already from, you know, from the Fusion product. While the Fusion product may, on its bill of material, you know, cost and gross margin, not provide as much a margin as you would get from using our own product, we see a significant improvement on churn, which compensates for that margin drop. Net-net, we think is a, you know, it's an incredible product and we have received a fantastic receptiveness from the marketplace so far.
Great. Great quarter. Let us know when you got a launch date.
Absolutely will. We are anxiously waiting ourselves. I think we're making great progress there, inching forward every day. Listen, we have had a great year thanks to Paul and the team. We've had a great year, in a market that we were underhanded simply because of a lack of capacity and a brand-new system shows up with, you know, no traffic on it. For the first time ever in a satellite industry introduces the term unlimited, although it's no longer unlimited. Now that limitation has been placed and the prices have been raised and capacities have been used. During the year that we had the maximum headwind, I think we delivered a growth year, both on revenue and EBITDA.
I think we are excited about when JUPITER 3 shows up, how we can, you know, much more effectively compete.
Okay. Sounds good. Thank you.
Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from Michael Rollins with Citi. Your line is now open.
Thanks. Just a couple questions. First, I'm curious, as you're greenlighting some of these projects and looking at other projects to leverage your assets and capabilities, what are the average payback periods that you're targeting for those investments, you know, including the constellation for the S-band that you were describing earlier? The second question is just a capital allocation question. As you have these different investment opportunities now in front of you, should investors expect a deliberate change in capital allocation and pausing the buyback activity to just provide more financial flexibility over the next 12 months-24 months as you're thinking about these different options? Thanks.
Right. Several comments to questions. Well, the simpler one to answer is we believe, you know, the investments we're about to make and we're making are accretive and improve our, you know, financial position in terms of margins and returns and, you know, over the horizons that typically are associated with capital investments in this industry. This industry, obviously, the capital investments are made, you know, a few years in advance, and there's no way to change that. However, we believe, you know, the margins associated in our models, with any new investments, would be at least as good as what we have historically done and might have potentially significantly better. Otherwise we wouldn't be going there. Second is related to our share buyback.
You know, we stopped the share buyback because we believe we are able to, in a longer term, we are able to generate significantly additional performance and gains beyond buying our own shares. We do have use cases for our capital and will have demands on our capital that we think would serve the shareholders best. That's why we, you know, stopped the share buyback, even though we absolutely believe that our share price is grossly undervalued. We think we still are better off and our shareholders are better off allowing us to use that capital to develop the business and put the business in a much faster growth trajectory.
Thank you.
Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from Ric Prentiss with Raymond James. Your line is now open.
Thanks. Hey, I have a few follow-up questions if I could. Continuing along the S-band line here. In the 10-K it talked about, you have the S-band terrestrial as well as satellite authorizations in Europe, Mexico and Chile, and in the process for applying and receiving additional authorizations. How should we think about what other regions of the world S-band might be of benefit to you? Who do you see as the most significant other operators or other companies that have S-band out there?
Hi, Ric, it's Dean. In terms of regions of the world, you know, we're really focusing on that from a commercial perspective. You know, which are the regions that are gonna be the most central to, you know, the most customers at the earliest stages of the project. We have a worldwide approach to market access and we're well underway with that. It's bolstered significantly by the top priority position that we enjoy at the ITU level with the SIRION-1 filing. That's the cornerstone of the effort. Market access will to a large degree follow the deployment of this new system, the SIRION-1 system.
As we have satellites to actually land traffic in jurisdictions, you know, we'll find that we'll get more and more market access there. I think in terms of competition, it'll probably vary from one region to the next. We feel like with, you know, with our technology and with the rights that we have through the ITU, we're very well positioned to be the leader.
within the U.S. specifically, I think, sister company DISH has some AWS spectrum that has a similar band. Where are your rights as far as being able to do something in the U.S. with the S-band?
Yeah, we're not at a point right now where we're making announcements or public statements on that. You know, there are multiple directions that we could go with that.
I think you also mentioned that enterprise has continued to grow as a percent of the revenues at Hughes. I believe it was like 22%, I think, in the most recent quarter. How should we think about where enterprise goes over time as far as a mix?
Yeah, Ric, well, if you look at it, I think, the last year and if you look forward next year or two, we see the enterprise business continuing to grow. Of course, you know, we've had the consumer business, you know, waiting for our new JUPITER 3 satellite system. That mix probably a little hard to project going forward because we expect to see both segments grow going forward. I think can't give you a specific number on that.
Okay. Yeah, obviously enterprise has grown as consumer's been under pressure, but consumer can grow. There's no set kind of goal of trying to get consumer and enterprise to a 60/40, 70/30, 50/50 kind of mix. There's no set kind of target from that standpoint.
No, not at this point, no.
One just mundane question. On the corporate side and the financials, the corporate costs of overhead came in a little higher than we were anticipating, I think had some tightness out there. Think about what the right level of corporate overhead is, as you have Hughes and Hughes growing and ESS maybe getting larger too over time. Are you at the right level? Is this the level this quarter that we should think about, or is the annual level right? How should we think about run rating corporate overheads?
Yeah, Ric. This is Terry. Yeah, we did see a little uptick there. Just to remind you, I mean, in addition to the corporate expenses, that does include a lot of our corporate development activities, you know, associated with the new projects we're doing around S-band. You know, there was a, you know, some generally increases in there, but also seeing a little bit of activity associated with our new project. You know, I think that level that we're at is, obviously we do everything we can to keep that at the levels we're at. You know, that's, I think that's an okay, you know, run rate going forward here into the near future.
Ric, well, let me just add from my own business philosophy perspective, we're not adding management overhead, if that's what your concern is. You know, these are maybe shown up at a corporate level, but it's not adding, you know, additional management. In fact, if anything, since, you know, since I joined the business, we have significantly streamlined our management and reporting lines in order to make sure we have a more of a flatter organization, as evidenced by the fact that we have here, we have Paul representing the entire globes, you know, front side of the house and so forth. There is some numbers there, but definitely they're not corporate overhead as we traditionally refer to them.
Gotcha. Final one for me to wrap it up. The ESS business, which is all albeit very small, did see a noticeable uptick in EBITDA. We had been thinking there might be some falloff at some point in the ESS business. How should we think about what's in the ESS line item and what the trend lines are for that small kind of residual segment?
Yeah. Rick, Terry here. Yeah, we've seen a real nice uptick, you know, into that business. You know, it's still the business is primarily, you know, third party leasing on the 105 and Echo 9 satellites. Made a lot of progress there in terms of selling additional capacity there, here, you know, towards the end of 2022. Look, I think, you know, the plan is to keep it at those, you know, levels, hopefully increase it, you know, continue to increase it a bit here as we go into 2023. You know, Yeah. Look, I think we're at a pretty good level that we're at, that we saw in Q4.
Okay. Very good. Look forward to seeing you all soon. Take care. Have a good day.
Thanks, Ric.
Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from Chris Quilty with Quilty Analytics. Your line is now open.
Okay, Terry, since you brought up the segment reporting, I gotta say I was hoping that with the 10-K we might get some better segment reporting than how it's broken down today. I guess given that Dave just left, there's probably a pretty heavy lift without a new CFO. When we think about the business going forward, when we take something like the S-band constellation getting on orbit, does that fall in the ESS? If you're building equipment for it in the Hughes segment that's sold out through the ESS segment. I mean, is there a way that we, you know, can think about the business on a go-forward basis of how you're gonna organize it into, you know, enterprise versus consumer or some other structure?
Because the current structure, I mean, there's a lot buried within the Hughes segment, in terms of other business lines that we really can't see and would love to get a little bit more visibility on that, which I think would help with investors and your valuation.
Chris, we understand that. We appreciate your point of view, and we agree with it. We have a business that is in transition. Both you have seen, first of all, the growth of our enterprise business. You have heard about our, you know, aspirations and goals to make a significant business out of our S-band and new era of growth through that. We're also looking at, you know, M&A through other arms of our enterprise business unrelated to the S-band. I think. I think 2023 will be a year of, I guess, transition for us as we kinda move forward with this Horizon Two and Horizon Three and Horizon One, which is an optimization of what we have had. As you have seen, we've done a good job in keeping the show running.
Horizon 2 and Horizon 3, which, you know, we are working on in 2023, gonna shape the business going forward in a significantly different way, we expect. As a result of that, it would be imprudent for us to go ahead and, you know, introduce additional segment details just to come and change them nine months later. I think you would want us to get our act together, be more definitive with what we are planning to do and how we're progressing, and then provide additional detail. We do intend to do that. It'll just take us some time to get it right. Yes, not having a CFO perhaps something to do with it, but I don't really honestly think that is a driver. I think the driver is that even with a CFO, our business is changing.
We need to know what is relevant, how much of our attention is gonna be focused on what. There are multiple avenues of growth and development. We are focused on all of them. You know, we'll find out this year which ones are most applicable for the investors. We do intend to make additional disclosures of that information.
Okay. I'll hold you to it. I heard 2024 new segment reporting. A second question. Did you give any guidance that I missed around CapEx for this year? Obviously, you've got the JUPITER 3 program tailing off. There is no new satellite program in the bucket. I think on their call last week, you know, Viasat said, you know, they expect their CPE related CapEx to be up, you know, threefold once the satellite launches. Is that a, you know, reasonable assumption that you're gonna be shipping so many damn terminals that, you know, the CPE or sorry, the CapEx isn't gonna really see a falloff in 2023?
You know, I think you should expect our CapEx to be similar to what you have seen. You know, you should not expect us to be vastly different. That's because a combination of offsetting effects. You know, some of the CapEx that we typically had to pay for JUPITER 3, we won't have to pay. That satellite, much of that CapEx has been paid for. On the other hand, you'll see us, you know, acquire additional customers, significantly additional customers, eating up some of the CapEx savings. All in all, we're not expecting a disruptive, you know, step function change in our CapEx on an annual basis. I mean, you know, don't hold me to, you know, every dollar of that, but we're not seeing...
We're in no way we are stating that our CapEx is gonna.
Have an, you know, impressive jump of any kind.
Gotcha. Where does the ground segment sit today? I think, are you building, what is it like eight gateways and their Q/V band and with the new technology, have you been able to do any testing on that?
Yeah. Chris, we've got over 18 sites installed. There's a number of different combinations and locations on, in our network 'cause we have a cloud architecture. Except for two sites, they're all completely installed. We've been able to test some of these sites on an existing capacity we have on EchoStar IX We're pretty far along in all of that process. We're very sure of the actual technology. As I mentioned earlier, we've actually deployed it in this configuration for two other customers. We have a lot of operating experience on it as well.
Now wait a second, when was EchoStar IX launched? You actually had Q/V band on EchoStar IX ?
We had, yeah, we had KA. The QV, we've not been able to test in that fashion, but we got good laboratory testing on that, so we're pretty sure how that will operate as well.
Gotcha. A question that Ric asked about the enterprise and consumer mix brought up a question which is, if I just think about JUPITER 3 as a platform, is the emphasis going to be able to reserve more of that capacity for enterprise customers? You know, do you think of enterprise and things like IFC or when I look at North America with, you know, SES-17 and ViaSat-3, you know, that's a market where you'll continue to serve it from a distance?
Well, I think two things. One, for JUPITER 3, in Latin America, South America, we're optimizing the capacity for yield. There we expect to continue to add significant additional enterprise business. The blend of the consumer versus enterprise will vary over time depending on where we think our best yield is. In North America, we still anticipate having applications for our capacity in the enterprise space, so it won't be just consumer. We're still working on those opportunities, have nothing at this point to relay.
All right. That's it for me. Thanks, guys.
Thanks, Chris.
At this time, I show no further questions. I would now like to turn the conference back to Terry Brown for closing remarks.
Yeah. We'd just like to thank everybody for joining today, and looking forward to talking to you again soon. Thank you.
This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.