Telematics Weekly: Good, Better, Bad — 3 Satellite Companies You Need to Know

by Alva H. Wright on Aug. 18, 2009, a Telematics Weekly exclusive

Along with the Q2 results there have been many other announcements regard­ing the health of var­i­ous satel­lite data providers for the M2M indus­try. Below, we review the state of Inmarsat, Irid­ium Satel­lite and GlobalStar.

Inmarsat
The suc­cess­ful com­mer­cial launch of a third Inmarsat-​​4 satel­lite in Jan­u­ary has report­edly allowed Inmarsat to pro­vide bet­ter global cov­er­age. For Q2 of this year core Inmarsat busi­ness climbed 8 per cent to $337M, dri­ven by strong demand for its new mar­itime voice and data ser­vices, Fleet and Fleet­Broad­band. Rev­enues in the mar­itime busi­ness climbed 5.2 per cent to $177M. Inmarsat also exer­cised its option to buy dis­tri­b­u­tion busi­ness Stratos in April. Stratos is a leader in deliv­er­ing vital voice, data and IP com­mu­ni­ca­tions and boasts more than 20,000 cus­tomers worldwide.

Note­wor­thy: Accord­ing to Andrew Sukawaty, chief exec­u­tive of Inmarsat, the satel­lite oper­a­tor is con­sid­er­ing launch­ing either a pan-​​European radio or TV ser­vice in part­ner­ship with a mobile phone oper­a­tor or media com­pany. This would be made pos­si­ble by uti­liz­ing the unique spec­trum license it was awarded by the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion, which would allow Inmarsat and its part­ner to offer ser­vices to 27 coun­tries across Europe.

Irid­ium Satellite
The num­ber of sub­scribers was up 23.9% from Q2 2008 to 347,000. Irid­ium saw a marked increase in sub­scriber growth in their emerg­ing M2M mar­ket, up 71.4% from Q2 2008. Although equip­ment sales declined 25.7%, unknown if related to Inmarsat’s acqui­si­tion of Stratos, rev­enue was up 1.2% from prior year quarter.

Note­wor­thy: The Fed­eral Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Com­mis­sion has approved GHL Acqui­si­tion Corp.’s pur­chase of mobile satel­lite ser­vices com­pany Irid­ium Hold­ings LLC. The trans­ac­tion, which the com­pa­nies announced in Sep­tem­ber 2008, will take Irid­ium pub­lic. A spe­cial stock­hold­ers’ meet­ing is sched­uled for Sept. 23 to vote on whether or not to approve the pur­chase of Irid­ium. For Irid­ium, the deal means a $500M cap­i­tal injec­tion to the satel­lite company’s cof­fers and helps advance plans to build their next-​​generation satel­lite con­stel­la­tion, which will be par­tially funded by the Air Force, NASA and sev­eral envi­ron­men­tal groups.

Glob­al­Star
Thanks to com­plet­ing $738M financ­ing Glob­al­Star still has a heart­beat but no one knows for how long. Q2 results mark a sig­nif­i­cant down­turn. Total rev­enue was reported at $15.7M, down 68% from the pre­vi­ous year and Net Loss was $13.8M, up 52% from the pre­vi­ous year.

Note­wor­thy: Shortly after announc­ing the release of their SPOT Satel­lite GPS Mes­sen­ger Glob­al­Star also announced the exit of its COO, Thomas Colby in July. To date nei­ther announce­ment has resulted in much fanfare.