07.14.25
Posted in Broadband, Financials, KVH, Maritime, Operators, SpaceX at 4:29 pm by timfarrar
As I told the Wall St Journal last week, the revenue growth reported in the newly filed accounts for Starlink’s international operations is amazing, in the context of a satellite industry that does not grow fast. In fact, Starlink’s near $2B of international broadband service revenues reported in 2024 compares to about $3B for all other satellite operators combined, a roughly 40% market share that has been obtained in only the third full year of Starlink’s operations.
However, that alone represents a warning sign: in order to grow further and faster, Starlink now needs to focus heavily on expanding the market beyond traditional satellite users, not just winning customers from other satellite operators (though of course they will do that too). And terminal prices are already getting lower and lower: Starlink’s consumer terminal revenues in these international markets averaged only about $230 per new terminal manufactured in 2024, so terminal subsidies in 2025 (with 5M terminals manufactured in the last 11 months) may end up being as high as $1B.
These accounts don’t represent the whole of Starlink’s business, they exclude direct US sales to individuals, businesses and the government, which account for more than half of Starlink’s revenues. We’ve just published a note giving a more detailed breakdown of these accounts by customer type and geography, as well as an assessment of the changes to our 100+ page Starlink profile that was published last October. Get in touch if you’re interested in subscribing to our research.
One additional area of interest in Starlink’s financial reporting is the large prepayments that the company has received, which have gone a long way to shoring up its cash position and allowing the company to claim it has $3B of cash on hand (at least before the company handed over $2B of that to xAI). At the end of last year Starlink’s international business had booked over $600M of deferred revenue from one or more counterparties and I’m sure there will be lots of speculation about the source of those payments.
One example of how (much smaller) prepayments work is given by KVH, which as a public company helpfully discloses this information, with enough granularity to allow all of the details to be worked out. We published a profile of KVH last November which discusses all of this, but as shown below, KVH entered into a purchase of 15PB of data for a total of $16.95M in June 2024 (i.e. a price of $1.13 per Gbyte), with the data to be consumed over 15 months (according to KVH’s 2025Q1 call, the “follow-on pool” will be renegotiated “at some point later this year”).
However, according to KVH’s Q1 results, the company is far short of this goal, only having consumed 30% of the total after 9 months, and even being generous in terms of future growth in KVH’s Starlink business, it will likely take until early 2026 for the data pool to be used up. So the question is what will Starlink and KVH do at the end of Q3? Roll the additional data into a new larger pool? Or forfeit perhaps $5M of prepaid capacity?
This highlights one of the challenges for Starlink distributors that commit to prepurchase large amounts of data at an attractive rate. Each time a distributor renews their capacity pool, they may end up more and more dependent on Starlink continuing to supply them with capacity, and less and less able to divert spending to other LEO systems, even if they want to be “network-agnostic.”
And what then for other competing LEO providers who are seeking distributors to sell their services? Which distributors will actually have any spare budget to divert to these other sources of capacity? And what about the risk that Starlink might someday decide not to rollover millions of dollars of unused capacity if a distributor looks elsewhere? That’s likely to add to fears that Starlink will dominate the satellite industry, as I discussed in an NPR podcast a few weeks ago.
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06.03.15
Posted in Inmarsat, Iridium, KVH, Maritime, Operators, Services, VSAT at 8:53 am by timfarrar
Despite the delays in the launch of GX, it seems Inmarsat may be looking to stitch up an even larger share of the maritime market in the near term. Rumors are flying that Inmarsat may soon make a formal bid to acquire KVH, the largest maritime VSAT player in terms of vessels (though not in revenues), adding about 3500 more terminals to Inmarsat’s existing 2200 VSAT equipped ships.
KVH generated nearly $80M from its miniVSAT business in 2014 with an average service ARPU of $1500 per month, compared to Inmarsat’s $90M and ARPU of $4000 including equipment leases (this equates to $2500 per month after stripping out hardware, according to Inmarsat’s most recent results call, which is a more appropriate point of comparison with the KVH ARPU).
The difference in ARPUs between Inmarsat’s current VSAT business and KVH is striking, in fact KVH’s smaller V3 terminal (which has about 900 active terminals) is generating around $500 in monthly ARPU, below even Inmarsat’s FleetBB ARPU of $700 (note that the standard FleetBB package sold by KVH now only provides 20 Mbytes per month of data for $749, whereas KVH offers airtime at rates as low as $0.99 per Mbyte).
If Inmarsat does move ahead with a KVH bid, it would likely be seen as a counter to Airbus’s disposal of its Vizada business unit, because Inmarsat would then have by far the largest number of VSAT-equipped ships. Indeed it would not be surprising to see attempts by competitors to block the deal on antitrust grounds, not to mention the concerns that current KVH customers will have about potential future price increases.
However, it would also be something of an acknowledgement that GX is optimally positioned as a lower end off-the-shelf maritime VSAT service (like KVH’s miniVSAT), as a step up from FleetBB, rather than as a high end solution for cruise ships and oil rigs. KVH’s growth has slowed in the last year, with terminal shipments staying at close to 1000 per year in 2012, 2013 and 2014, but net adds and ARPUs declining. Pressure from Inmarsat will only intensify, once the low cost 60cm GX antenna is available with global coverage, so this looks like it would be a good time for KVH to sell out.
Inmarsat investors will presumably also welcome a deal, with a much clearer path established to a GX maritime business of $200M+ in annual service revenues over the next few years (though its important to note this represents a retail service business, not the wholesale spend on satellite capacity). However, the obvious question that customers will ask is whether low end price packages will still be offered for miniVSAT users, or whether Inmarsat will move them up to much higher price points, as it has done with FleetBB over the last few years.
And what will be the alternative for these users: will it be other VSAT solutions, or will it be the new broadband services (comparable in capability to FleetBB) offered by Iridium’s NEXT constellation? It will take some time for either of these options to emerge, with low cost small Ku-band VSAT antennas needed for the former, and completion of the NEXT constellation needed for the latter. That provides a further motivation for Inmarsat to move sooner rather than later, while its freedom of action in the low end of the maritime market remains relatively unconstrained by competitive alternatives.
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04.22.13
Posted in Globalstar, Handheld, Inmarsat, Iridium, KVH, Maritime, Operators, Services, VSAT at 9:22 am by timfarrar
Its interesting to note that Inmarsat has been competing much more aggressively against key competitors in the last few months. First, I’m told that Inmarsat offered a bounty to Telemar to capture Anglo Eastern, a key Iridium Open Port customer with 350 ships, from Globe Wireless, in the fourth quarter of 2012.
Then Inmarsat announced in March that Nordic Tankers, one of KVH’s earliest headline customers, was migrating to XpressLink “for enhanced reliability”. Apparently the pricing on that deal is well below the standard list price for XpressLink, but Inmarsat was very keen to demonstrate its ability to take customers away from KVH.
Now (perhaps showing a little pique at losing the recent tender for the AT&T Genus replacement contract) Inmarsat is going after Globalstar, with new North American ISatPhone Pro regional voice plans which will start on May 1, and match Globalstar’s recently announced Orbit and Galaxy plans (though without Globalstar’s “double time minutes” promotional offer). Inmarsat is once again offering a huge bounty to service providers for these new signups, equivalent to multiple months of service revenue.
All of these developments suggest that Inmarsat is determined to seek topline growth in its L-band business and is no longer reluctant (as in the past) to explicitly target its competitors with selective pricing, even though this runs counter to Inmarsat’s recent tendency to increase list prices. Of course, it is less clear whether the new deals will be profitable for Inmarsat, given the incentives needed to achieve these sales.
But with Inmarsat’s investors focused intently on whether the wholesale L-band Inmarsat Global business has returned to growth, and apparently willing to overlook the recent significant contraction in margins within Inmarsat’s Solutions business unit (blamed on a transfer of margin from retail to wholesale operations), that might not matter for now. However, if Inmarsat wants to make more acquisitions (and it is hard to see in the long term who else might end up operating LightSquared’s satellites), then regulators might wonder whether industry consolidation could give Inmarsat even more market power.
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