04.19.12
Posted in Financials, ICO/DBSD, Iridium, LightSquared, Operators, Spectrum, TerreStar at 9:32 am by timfarrar
This week’s Bloomberg article about LightSquared had an interesting assertion from Nathan Pettit, an assistant professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business that “Falcone’s doubling down on LightSquared fits a pattern”:
“People of status and power have an illusory sense they can control more than they do,” said Pettit. “That leads to unrealistic optimism, increased risk-taking and decreased inhibitions.”
That brought back memories of the classic case study on Iridium’s 1999 bankruptcy, by Sydney Finkelstein, which was included in his book “Why Smart Executives Fail” (uniquely, Motorola actually features twice in the book, both for Iridium and for missing the transition to digital cellphones). I wonder if Mr. Falcone has ever read this book and case study, because the parallels with the LightSquared debacle are quite striking. In particular, the three forces that according to Finkelstein combined to create Iridium’s business failure were:
1. Escalating commitment among Motorola executives who pushed the project forward in spite of known and potentially fatal technology and market problems
2. For personal and professional reasons Iridium’s CEO was unwilling to cut losses and abandon the project
3. Iridium’s board was structured in a way that prevented it from performing its role of corporate governance
In the case of LightSquared/SkyTerra/Harbinger, it is pretty easy to identify exactly the same problems:
1. Escalating commitment by Falcone, who kept devoting an increasing proportion of Harbinger’s assets to SkyTerra/LightSquared (and other spectrum projects such as TerreStar), despite Falcone’s apparent awareness of the GPS interference problems and the lack of interest from wireless operators in buying this (or any other MSS) spectrum. Similar to Motorola, Falcone’s history was that similar bets (e.g. in subprime mortgages and iron ore) had paid off in the past and so just as with Motorola he has maintained his “arrogance” that “the investment thesis was dead-on“.
2. Unwillingness to cut losses, because Harbinger’s investment was in equity, which would all be wiped out if Falcone did not continue with the project, but the chance of a recovery could be preserved by raising additional senior debt from third parties (just as with Iridium, where the bondholders also got stuck with a 99% loss because in the end the assets were essentially worthless).
3. Lack of corporate governance, because Falcone was able to make whatever bets he wanted with Harbinger’s money, despite the fact that as another Bloomberg interviewee pointed out “There should have been constraints on risk and concentration of the investments”. In addition, SkyTerra’s board was focused solely on trying to raise money and then sell the company to someone else (Falcone) rather on whether they actually had a viable business at the end of the day, because they could never hope to fund a terrestrial network buildout themselves.
As I’ve pointed out before, it took nearly nine months after the Iridium bankruptcy filing in August 1999, before the investors actually realized that the assets were worthless (and considered de-orbiting the satellites), during which time even as smart an investor as Craig McCaw considered a multi-billion dollar commitment to rescue Iridium. Indeed in the end McCaw and others actually committed $1B+ to rescue the similar ICO project, much of which now looks to have been wasted after ICO’s jury verdict against Boeing was reversed last week. As we look to what will happen next, I’m therefore left wondering if history will once again repeat itself, with Icahn in the role of McCaw, and a decade long court case in the offing.
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04.17.12
Posted in Financials, Inmarsat, LightSquared, Operators, Regulatory, Spectrum at 4:53 pm by timfarrar
Separate articles published yesterday by The Daily Beast and Bloomberg had plenty to say about Phil Falcone’s “deep perspiration stains” and his claim that “he doesn’t sweat” under pressure. However, with the waiver of the covenant breaches on LightSquared’s first lien debt expiring on April 30, the heat is certainly on him to figure out the way forward.
Bloomberg’s article indicates that Falcone is hoping Carl Icahn “might become a partner”, as he searches for a way to keep LightSquared out of bankruptcy. In that context it is interesting to note that news emerged last week that Icahn is nearing a deal to buy a 14.9% stake in Ferrous Resources, a Brazilian iron ore mining company, from Harbinger at a price of $1.50 per share, one third of what Harbinger paid for shares in the company in 2009 and less than half of the valuation put on these shares by Harbinger in January 2012. At least conceivably, such a deal could provide a quid pro quo for Icahn’s support in keeping LightSquared out of bankruptcy, and it is notable that Harbinger also needs to raise $47.5M from this asset sale to repay its own loan (from Jefferies) by April 30, the same day that the LightSquared covenant waiver expires.
Two weeks ago I thought that the April 20 deadline (this coming Friday), when Inmarsat can terminate its Cooperation Agreement with LightSquared, could provide the impetus for a decision on whether or not to file for bankruptcy sometime this week. However, if the future of Harbinger itself is riding on avoiding a potential default on the Jefferies loan, then the Inmarsat deadline might well now be ignored. Inmarsat has been standing firm on its insistence that it must be paid even more money to contemplate any extension of the Cooperation Agreement, so if the April 20 deadline passes without payment being made, then it is hard to see an outcome where Inmarsat doesn’t just terminate the Agreement for default, and reclaim several additional MHz of spectrum from LightSquared as part of these default conditions. In those circumstances, it would become even harder for LightSquared’s successors to ever deploy a terrestrial network in the L-band MSS spectrum, even if the FCC was to mandate GPS receiver standards at some point in the future.
As a result, we may soon be asking what is actually left for LightSquared’s creditors, in the absence of any agreement with Inmarsat or Sprint, other than a ground spare satellite (which at least originally was worth $120M to Boeing, based on their vendor financing agreement) and an in-orbit satellite (which is probably worth very little, given its negative cashflows). Of course, LightSquared will try and sue the government, but that may now be made much harder by the statements of DirecTV’s CEO, who told Bloomberg that they “looked at LightSquared’s spectrum in 2004″ and concluded “It conflicts with GPS, it will never work”. DirecTV’s CEO may be misremembering the events, because Rupert Murdoch (then owner of DirecTV) was telling the Wall St Journal in November 2005 that “We may be forming a company with partners to build something out here that would give you broadband” and I had understood that these discussions were in 2005 (possibly even into early 2006) and broke down mainly over price.
Nevertheless, even Falcone admitted that in 2010 he “knew there were interference issues [but] they weren’t his to solve because GPS users were encroaching on his spectrum”. If that is the case then wouldn’t it have been rather better to tell the GPS community about the problem years ago, rather than try to spring it on them as a fait accompli at the last minute? It seems that as DirecTV’s CEO put it “Falcone ‘made a bet that the government would say, “Sure, go ahead,” or somehow make it right.’”.
Of course the complaints of Harbinger’s own investors will be significantly boosted by Falcone’s admission, and LightSquared’s investors may well suggest that UBS ought to have enquired more deeply into this issue before selling the first lien debt. However, for the moment, both Falcone and LightSquared’s debt investors appear to be more focused on securing a spectrum swap, which as Walt Piecyk says in the Bloomberg article (and as I’ve said many times before) “isn’t a realistic option [because] there’s nothing readily available and…if there was, that’s spectrum that could be auctioned off for billions in proceeds”.
Indeed the news today that the FCC has appointed Gary Epstein, a former SkyTerra executive, as co-head of the Incentive Auction Task Force (something which has already attracted Sen. Grassley’s attention) may make it even harder for the FCC to take any action to help LightSquared, because further accusations of favoritism would be sure to follow.
All of this comes as attention finally seems to be turning to the fact that (as I’ve said for the last 18 months) the “spectrum crisis” is based on hyperbole from the wireless carriers (not to mention the FCC and White House). As Marty Cooper, the inventor of the cellphone and Cooper’s Law (which states that spectral efficiency, or put another way potential wireless capacity in a given area, has doubled every 2.5 years for the past century) puts it:
“Every two and a half years, every spectrum crisis has gotten solved, and that’s going to keep happening,” Mr. Cooper said. “We already know today what the solutions are for the next 50 years.”
In fact, the CTIA’s semi-annual statistics, released last week, gave a pretty clear indication of what those solutions are. Remarkably, in the last six months of 2011, an all-time record 26,465 cell sites were added in the US (an increase of more than 10% in just 6 months) despite the fact that wireless capital investment by the carriers during 2011 was up only 1.7% on 2010. Thus it seems pretty clear that deployment of new (small, lower cost?) cell sites for capacity enhancement is working very well to accommodate increasing amounts of data traffic, without imposing any significant burden on the wireless operators. Indeed, with the operators apparently able to include on-net WiFi traffic in the data they report to CTIA, as AT&T is probably doing, the need for more licensed spectrum may be reduced even further. As a result, if LightSquared’s investors ever believed Mr. Falcone’s assertion that “it is clear that the investment thesis was dead-on” then maybe they ought to start having some doubts about that as well.
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04.06.12
Posted in Financials, Inmarsat, LightSquared, Operators, Regulatory, Spectrum, TerreStar at 6:47 am by timfarrar
Its certainly been an eventful week for LightSquared (why is it that whenever I go on vacation something significant seems to happen?) and press reports have indicated that we are now moving a lot closer to my prediction in January that creditors would force the company into bankruptcy before all the money had gone, with Mr. Icahn apparently indicating that he is seeking a debt for equity swap to squeeze out Harbinger.
Mr. Falcone has responded by suggesting that he is “seriously considering” a “voluntary bankruptcy” as “one of several options” for the company. More pointedly, yesterday he indicated (in a very explicit reference to Icahn) that this would be an attempt to “protect the company from creditors who are more interested in a quick flip”.
Of course, the idea that Harbinger could remain in control rests on Falcone’s view that “a bankruptcy would not necessarily wipe out the equity holders of LightSquared because the spectrum it owns retains value” (something that I’m told debtholders consider simply “delusional”). At this point in time, the LightSquared spectrum is only usable for satellite services, which its very hard to believe could generate any positive value (because it would be difficult and time consuming for the satellite business even to reach cash flow breakeven).
As I’ve said in the past, the best case is that 20MHz of the spectrum might be usable in a decade or more for a terrestrial service, but if you have to wait a decade for the spectrum to be usable, and LightSquared’s “$10B waiver” has been withdrawn, then its hard to see why anyone would pay more than the $1.4B DISH paid for 20MHz of TerreStar spectrum last summer. Unfortunately using the spectrum at all would require maintaining the lease deal with Inmarsat at an NPV cost of somewhere between $1.5B and $2B (depending on the discount rate applied), which would need to be deducted from the above sum, and so its not clear that there is any positive value for the spectrum under this scenario either.
The last remaining hope to have some usable (and valuable) spectrum in the near term is to engineer a spectrum swap, but that would rely on the DoD showing some goodwill towards LightSquared, something which has hardly been evident to date.
As a result, after a voluntary bankruptcy filing, we would be thrown headlong into a valuation fight, where the debtholders tried to argue to the judge that LightSquared’s likely attribution to itself of a $2B-$3B valuation and proposed cramdown of the first lien debt was simply not feasible. It is difficult to see LightSquared prevailing, when the basis for a high valuation of the spectrum is simply not sustainable. However, these arguments will tie the company up in court for the rest of the year, and in the interim presumably Harbinger would try to stay in charge.
The timing of a bankruptcy filing is likely to be dictated not only by the April 30 expiry of LightSquared’s waiver in respect of the covenant breach from the termination of the Sprint agreement, but also by the status of LightSquared’s Cooperation Agreement with Inmarsat. Earlier this week, a deal appeared to be on the table whereby LightSquared would make the missed February payment of $56M and give up any claims that Inmarsat had failed to complete Phase 1, in exchange for a two year deferral of further payments. However, LightSquared appears reluctant to pay out additional money to Inmarsat when a bankruptcy filing would also prevent Inmarsat from terminating the Cooperation Agreement and could still allow LightSquared to reach a resolution with Inmarsat later on if that was felt to be useful. As a result, I expect LightSquared’s bankruptcy filing to come before the April 20 deadline on which Inmarsat can terminate the Cooperation Agreement for default, and plausibly it could be made over the weekend of April 14/15.
Mr. Falcone has also taken to the press to accuse “the FCC of bowing to special interests” by blocking his “shovel ready” project. The article suggests that he “first got into the telecom business in 2010″ when he “placed a $14 billion bet on what he thought was a sure thing”, which of course is revisionist history at its worst. In fact Mr. Falcone had been an investor in the predecessors to LightSquared and TerreStar since 2004, and made most of his purported $2.9B investment well before 2010.
Since the FCC granted the SkyTerra transfer of control (including various ATC license modifications and what appears to have been an implicit promise of a later waiver) to Harbinger in March 2010, the investment has mostly come from third parties. By my calculations, Harbinger has only invested about $700M into LightSquared over the last two years (including the cost of buying out minority equity investors in SkyTerra), while other investors have put in roughly $2B.
A better account of the history would be that by late 2009 (when Harbinger decided to buy out the other investors in SkyTerra), Harbinger had already invested over $2B in this project which had all gone to waste. At that point, Mr. Falcone desperately tried to rescue his losing bet (with assistance from the FCC) by persuading other people to invest their money into this supposedly valuable spectrum.
Remember that Harbinger also invested almost $1B in TerreStar’s equity and preferred shares from 2005 through 2010, attempting the same trick of converting satellite spectrum for terrestrial services, and that also was lost when Echostar acquired TerreStar’s senior debt and pushed Harbinger out, just as Icahn is likely to do in LightSquared. Ironically, back in August 2010, when TerreStar was on the point of bankruptcy, Falcone also claimed to Reuters that TerreStar’s senior debt was easily covered by its spectrum value. He was wrong then, as DISH’s ultimate bid was just enough to pay off the senior debt (which Echostar held the majority of) at par and unsecured creditors lost most of their claims (while the equity in TerreStar Networks was worthless). In the case of LightSquared it appears he will be wrong by an even greater margin, because GPS interference and the Inmarsat lease costs will dramatically reduce any interest in buying the LightSquared spectrum, and make it hard even for secured creditors to realize much of a recovery.
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03.26.12
Posted in Financials, LightSquared, Operators, Spectrum at 6:27 pm by timfarrar
Today news has emerged that Harbinger posted a near 30% decline in its flagship fund in February, due to a writedown of the value of its LightSquared equity investment by “outside auditors”. This comes on top of writedown of its LightSquared investment late last year, which led to the fund declining 47% in 2011, after a 59% cut in the value of its LightSquared holdings.
At the end of January 2012, Harbinger reportedly valued LightSquared’s equity at $1.5B, implying that prior to the 2011 markdown it was valued at ~$3.65B, for a total LightSquared enterprise value of perhaps $6B, given the amount of additional funds that had been raised. The new valuation being put on LightSquared’s equity is not stated, but can be deduced from the fact that in January Harbinger’s largest fund reportedly had total assets of $2.4B, of which $1.07B was LightSquared debt and equity. If the LightSquared equity component was ~$1B, then a ~30% writedown in the fund’s overall value could equate to as much as a 70%-75% writedown in the value of LightSquared’s equity. In other words, LightSquared’s equity may now be valued at less than $500M by Harbinger’s outside auditors.
While this valuation may soon be irrelevant once LightSquared files for bankruptcy, one interesting side effect is that the cut in the value of Harbinger’s fund appears to make it very likely that Mr. Falcone is no longer a billionaire, as was indicated by Forbes just a few weeks ago. The Forbes calculation came just prior to the February writedown, and given that Mr. Falcone’s wealth moves very much in line with the value of Harbinger’s fund (because as he told Vanity Fair last summer “I have always kept the bulk of my money, and I mean the bulk of my money, in the fund”), the 30% writedown seems all but certain to have cost Mr. Falcone more than $100M of the $1.1B that Forbes calculated he was worth last month.
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03.21.12
Posted in ICO/DBSD, Operators, Regulatory, Spectrum, TerreStar at 11:48 am by timfarrar
After today’s FCC Open Meeting there is a lot of speculation about the content of the 2GHz NPRM and NOI which is expected to emerge very shortly. The FCC indicated that it would reallocate the entire 40MHz of spectrum (2000-2020MHz uplink/2180-2200MHz downlink) to terrestrial services, redesignating it as the AWS-4 band. Many have assumed that this means that DISH would secure unlimited terrestrial rights across the whole band, with no givebacks, but the FCC was careful to indicate in the press conference afterwards that “flexibility applies across the whole band” but not that DISH will get flexibility across the entire 40MHz.
UPDATE: The NPRM has now been released and it appears that there is no definitive requirement for DISH to give back any spectrum, and it would simply be allocated terrestrial licenses nationally in exchange for a buildout criteria of 30% of the population within 3 years (not dissimilar to the 100M POPs agreed to by LightSquared) and 70% of the population in each economic area within 7 years (a somewhat less onerous requirement than LightSquared). Though the possibility is raised that DISH will move up by 5MHz and possibly even give up another 5MHz of uplink spectrum, there is no mention of a larger amount of spectrum being returned to the FCC in exchange for these terrestrial rights, suggesting that Charlie Ergen has played a stunningly good hand of poker to achieve such a result. Of course, it would not be in the least bit surprising to see accusations of a windfall emerge, just as they did with LightSquared.
The FCC has also accompanied the NPRM with an NOI, which proposes a “variation of the AWS-4 band plan” intended to “extend the AWS-1 and PCS spectrum with 65MHz of usable bandwidth”. This alternate plan involves converting the MSS uplinks to downlink spectrum, so that the entire 1995-2025MHz band would be additional PCS downlink spectrum. In exchange the MSS licensee could be granted access to the 1695-1710MHz band which would be paired with 2180-2200MHz as an AWS extension band. This hardly seems to be something that DISH would be keen on, given that it would involve defining another non-standard band class, and would not be compatible with the existing 2GHz satellite services, which DISH might at some point want to explore in Europe.
What is striking is that the FCC’s proposals are hard to reconcile with the requirement in the payroll tax bill back in February that the FCC should identify a “additional 15MHz of contiguous spectrum” to be auctioned, which is why I had assumed the NOI would propose that DISH gave up 10MHz of spectrum and moved its uplinks up by 5MHz into the 2020-25MHz J-block spectrum, as I indicated back in February.
In this context it is hard to see why the FCC bothered with the NOI, unless it is to use this to put more pressure on DISH to give up part of its uplink spectrum. I had guessed that the NOI would be the FCC’s preferred outcome and so NPRM would propose far more unfavorable terms for DISH. In other words, the NPRM would be “designed to fail” in order to drive all parties to a solution which would free up a greater amount of spectrum for auction.
Now we will have to see how commentators react to the NPRM. Could further pressure be brought to bear over the potential windfall, leading to a proposal that DISH gives up an extra 5MHz of uplink spectrum and create the 15MHz block of spectrum for the FCC? If not then the FCC will presumably have to look elsewhere for spectrum to meet the Congressional mandate, unless it perhaps claimed that it is not possible to auction the H-block due to interference concerns in the 1915-1920MHz band, and so the 1995-2010MHz block would meet this mandate. More importantly, the FCC appears to be betting that DISH will actually build out a network to introduce competition to the US wireless market, and so if the end result (after the November election) is a takeover bid from AT&T, it will be interesting to see what attitude the FCC takes to such a bid. If that occurs, and goes through without any further givebacks, then the FCC might very well be seen to have failed in its attempts to maximize the value of spectrum for the public interest. On the other hand, perhaps that could be the point at which an additional 5MHz of spectrum might be given up.
FURTHER UPDATE: As an aside, the NOI doesn’t appear to do much for LightSquared’s hopes of creating substantial incremental value for its Crown Castle lease in the 1670-75MHz block. LightSquared is apparently busy trying to extend its financial runway, but it may now be more difficult to avoid the looming financial crunch at the end of the second quarter of 2012, when LightSquared must repay a roughly $300M loan to its creditors.
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03.15.12
Posted in Financials, LightSquared, Operators, Regulatory, Spectrum at 1:54 pm by timfarrar
Bizarrely enough, the price of LightSquared’s debt has been increasing over the last week, as the company failed to file for bankruptcy in advance of the termination of their agreement with Sprint, which is expected to come today, and LightSquared hired lawyers to sue the government for compensation, once their ATC license is revoked by the FCC. The primary reason for this delay appears to be that major investors (Icahn/Appaloosa/Beal, who may hold as much as $500M-$600M in face value of the $1.6B in first lien debt) are sitting on the sidelines, apparently unable to decide what they would do if they forced LightSquared into bankruptcy, while UBS (who may still hold $300M-$400M of the first lien debt) certainly do not want a bankruptcy (because then they would probably become a target for litigation).
As I understand it, if LightSquared continue to pay the interest on their debt (of which ~$50M in cash is due on April 1) then a two-thirds vote of debtholders would be needed to force the company into bankruptcy, and so I now expect that LightSquared will probably make the interest payment due at the end of this month. Once Sprint return $65M to LightSquared after their agreement is terminated, and with payments no longer being made to Inmarsat, LightSquared will then still have over $200M in cash on its balance sheet at the end of the first quarter, allowing LightSquared to continue to pretend (for potentially the rest of this year) that they can succeed with a lawsuit against the FCC or obtain a spectrum swap from the government. The only large near term outstanding payment is the repayment of around $300M due at the end of June on LightSquared’s holding company loan, and LightSquared are suggesting that the sale of their terrestrial spectrum leases will be enough to cover this repayment (though that assumes both a favorable proposal from the FCC next week and a lot of interest in the 1670-75MHz spectrum).
Of course if LightSquared do drag this situation out for so long, then the potential recovery for investors may be considerably less than I originally anticipated. LightSquared appears unlikely to challenge the termination of its deal with Sprint, thereby writing off $236M that was advanced to Sprint last year, and may also allow its deal with Inmarsat to expire on April 20, thereby preventing any deployment of a terrestrial network in their L-band spectrum in the future and potentially giving up the $490M paid to Inmarsat so far. In addition, there may be little or no cash left on the balance sheet, limiting any recovery and perhaps even raising the possibility of DIP financing being needed for a lengthy bankruptcy. Thus its hard to see why investors would regard a delay in a bankruptcy filing as a positive development for the company.
In the meantime, LightSquared also continues to have bad luck with its satellite, after the new SkyTerra-1 satellite suffered a lengthy outage last week, leaving its existing satellite customers (over 200K terminals) without service from March 7 to March 11. While the satellite does not appear to be damaged, this event will undoubtedly be exploited to raise further doubts about whether customers could rely on the LightSquared satellite for service, assuming the second satellite remains a ground spare rather than being launched into orbit.
This development may also make it harder to come up with an alternative satellite-only business plan to preserve the LightSquared business while the FCC considers whether to allow terrestrial use in the L-band at some point in the distant future, after a lengthy transition period to allow GPS and MSS terminals to be upgraded.
However, it was already difficult to envisage such an outcome, when the majority of panelists on the spectrum panel I moderated this week at the Satellite 2012/MSUA-9 conference estimated that it would take 15-30 years before any terrestrial network could be deployed in the L-band MSS spectrum, beyond the end of life of the SkyTerra-1 satellite.
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Posted in Aeronautical, Broadband, Inmarsat, Maritime, Operators, Services, VSAT at 12:37 pm by timfarrar
The biggest news of this week’s Satellite 2012 show was only hinted at in the background, with many elements of the announcement (which I’m told was originally scheduled for Monday March 12) apparently delayed while the final details are worked out. Panasonic hinted at their role in this deal on the in-flight connectivity panel, stating that they would be investing “more than any other player in the aeronautical sector” in a new network, while Inmarsat backpeddled on their recent aggressive approach to potential Global Xpress partners, by indicating that they would allow GX maritime distribution partners to keep their own VSAT services rather than being forced to resell Inmarsat’s XpressLink Ku-band service for the next 2-3 years.
What has shaken up the industry is that Intelsat apparently planned to announce additional elements of their global Ku-band maritime and aeronautical service, using new spot beam Ku-band satellites in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific ocean regions. Although Intelsat did issue a press release on Monday, highlighting their focus on mobility, this largely reiterated existing commitments, and omitted both new satellite plans (including IS-29, which is expected to be a high capacity satellite in the Atlantic, and will likely be built by Boeing) and Intelsat’s anchor tenant(s). More details on both of these elements are expected soon. Panasonic will apparently be the anchor aeronautical tenant for this new network and is expected to make an upfront commitment (for purchase of capacity) to help fund Intelsat’s satellite program which could exceed $100M. Many maritime VSAT providers are also looking actively at potential use of the network, as an alternative to Inmarsat’s Global Xpress project, because Intelsat have promised to operate purely as a wholesale capacity provider, rather than competing with their own customers as Inmarsat is doing. The cost of Intelsat’s Ku-band capacity is said to be comparable to Global Xpress (though that will undoubtedly be disputed by Inmarsat), and with Intelsat’s numerous Ku-band mobility beams, coverage will apparently be nearly as great as on Global Xpress.
The repercussions of this development are far-reaching, not least because it will make Inmarsat’s already challenging GX transition plan even more tricky. Inmarsat have recently backed off their original plan to select Rockwell Collins as the aeronautical terminal and distribution partner for GX and now appear poised to use Honeywell (who were originally Panasonic’s terminal development partner before Panasonic opted to bring that work in-house). Up until this week Inmarsat were requiring potential GX maritime distributors to drop their own VSAT service and instead act as agents for XpressLink until GX was launched, but Inmarsat’s CEO indicated on Wednesday that this is no longer the case. And Inmarsat are raising their prices for FleetBroadband service to try and prevent maritime VSAT competitors from using FleetBB as a backup, driving some of them such as KVH into Iridium’s arms with their new (and very aggressively priced) OpenPort backup service, which can cost less than 20% of Inmarsat’s on-demand FleetBB price per Mbyte.
Now the question is whether Inmarsat will have to engage in a further rethink of their maritime distribution strategy (prior to their hastily arranged maritime partner conference in May) as they look to assuage the widespread anger amongst distributors. Many distributors are openly delighted about Intelsat’s move, after they were told at Inmarsat’s January 2012 partner conference that they would just have to accept Inmarsat’s terms, and hand over their VSAT customers for XpressLink, because there was no other choice available. Inmarsat will also have to consider whether their revenue forecast for Global Xpress (of $500M in wholesale revenue by 2019 and $200M-$300M in 2016, based on their 8%-12% p.a. wholesale revenue growth target in 2014-16) is still achievable, especially if some of the key potential partners for maritime GX want to continue to use well-proven Ku-band services and therefore opt to stay with Intelsat for their maritime VSAT capacity.
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03.03.12
Posted in Broadband, Globalstar, Handheld, Inmarsat, Iridium, Maritime, Operators, Services at 8:23 am by timfarrar
Ease your trouble
We’ll pay them double
Not to look at you for a while
And you rely on
What you get high on
And you last just as long as it serves you
Explode or implode
Explode or implode
We will take care of it
This rather dark song seems to sum up perfectly Inmarsat’s current dilemma: will the recent price rises enable Inmarsat’s revenue growth rate to “explode” or will the souring relationship with customers and distributors ultimately cause their business to “implode”? As an article in Cruising World points out, the basic price of Inmarsat’s low end FleetBB plan (the Intellian version of which costs $55 per month) will “more than triple” in May, and “it’s surely looking like the company doesn’t feel much obligation to the boaters who purchased expensive but yacht-size FB hardware once able to get online most anywhere at reasonable costs if carefully used”.
I understand that the amount of bundled data included will double from 5 Mbytes/month to 10 Mbytes/month (which may not be terribly relevant to low end users), but the plan will not longer include any voice and SMS – that will be charged on top, increasing the costs further. Cruising World attributes the price increases to Inmarsat’s loss of LightSquared revenues, which is partially true, though I’m told that internally Inmarsat has set a target of double digit revenue growth within its maritime business, and with the core shipping business very depressed, the only way to do that is to force dramatic price increases upon existing Inmarsat customers.
Almost 60% of all FleetBB users are on this basic plan, and so nearly 15,000 maritime customers will be helping to “ease [Inmarsat's] troubles” by “pay[ing] them double”. More importantly, many of these customers bought their FleetBB terminals in the last two years, and now will most likely feel that they have been the victims of a bait and switch by Inmarsat.
The price changes in Inmarsat’s handheld business are equally dramatic, with roughly 90% of customers using either the basic plan or low end prepaid cards, which are also expected to more than double in price at the retail level. Thus Inmarsat will also be faced with something over 30,000 handheld customers who have bought their phones in the last 18 months and will similarly feel that they have been victims of a bait and switch.
‘Cause you’re deserted
What’s good, you hurt it
And it kills you it keeps you alive
So give it up
In a world of puppets
It’s a shame what they do to us all
Inmarsat will presumably counter that neither group of customers accounts for a large share of their revenues (I would estimate the basic FleetBB plan accounts for perhaps 10% of FleetBB revenues, while handheld is still generating only ~$1M of service revenues per quarter), but it can’t be good for long term business if there are something like 45,000 end users who’ve been hurt by Inmarsat and will be expressing their negative perceptions (“What’s good, you hurt it…It’s a shame what they do to us all”) of the company pretty openly.
Distributors are also likely to be deluged with complaints by these end users, and many service providers are already actively focusing on alternatives to Inmarsat, as we saw with the recent KVH-Iridium partnership. Distributors are thus understandable furious about Inmarsat’s moves, with the (printable) comments I’ve heard ranging from “harsh and irrational” to “just unprofessional” and simply have no idea what Inmarsat will do next.
Though distributors might not be able to “desert” Inmarsat right now, ironically the low end customers that Inmarsat is alienating in the maritime segment are precisely those for whom Iridium’s OpenPort represents a competitive offering. Indeed, in terms of the opportunity that Inmarsat has just created, Iridium apparently feel like its February 2007 (when Globalstar announced that their satellites were failing) all over again.
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03.01.12
Posted in Financials, ICO/DBSD, Operators, Regulatory, Spectrum, TerreStar at 11:52 am by timfarrar
After the FCC’s release yesterday evening of the agenda for the March 22 Commission Meeting, we are soon going to find out if DISH has struck a deal with the FCC to secure a waiver of the ATC restrictions in the 2GHz MSS band. Some commentators have seen the FCC agenda as a negative sign, pointing to potential delays in DISH’s deployment, based on the comments made by Charlie Ergen last week.
However, another way to look at this announcement is that the FCC is simply moving to implement the provisions in the spectrum bill signed by the President last week (including the proposal for “an alternative band plan…at 1695-1710 MHz”), which as I pointed out, clearly indicates that DISH would potentially give up 10MHz of spectrum and move its uplink band up by 5MHz to enable use of the PCS H-block.
Assuming that DISH gives up half of its uplink spectrum and this is converted into an additional 10MHz unpaired downlink at 2000-2010MHz (with an implicit guardband at 2010-15MHz), thereby maximizing the value of spectrum to be included in a future auction (and allowing Sprint the possibility of a 10x20MHz LTE Advanced network), then a rulemaking would certainly be needed to develop service rules for this new band configuration. However, it seems unlikely that the FCC would want to go back on what appears to have been a carefully engineered compromise passed by Congress just a couple of weeks ago. Given that Sprint’s agreement to settle its litigation against DISH back in October was also likely founded on a desire to gain access to the H-block spectrum, it wouldn’t just be DISH that would be upset by such a decision.
The proposed rulemaking may also achieve a couple of other purposes for the FCC. First of all it allows any deployment timetable to be keyed off the point when the new rules become final, thereby solving the arguments over whether the clock should start running on DISH’s buildout now or in 2015. Secondly it may help to push any bid by AT&T to buy DISH out beyond the November 2012 election and provide time for DISH to pull together an alternative consortium of partners (which might include one or more of T-Mobile, MetroPCS, DirecTV and America Movil). The wholesale access conditions contemplated by the Commission could then ensure that AT&T would not be able to unwind other partners’ access to this network in the future.
UPDATE (3/2): The FCC has just approved the transfer of control for DBSD and TerreStar this evening, but denied DISH’s application for the waiver, deferring this issue to the NPRM which will be considered at the Commission meeting on March 22. It appears that the FCC still wants to pursue the path outlined above, but was worried about the ramifications of granting the waiver without consideration of the proposed deal in a full public rulemaking, especially in the context of impending litigation from LightSquared. This also should allow the Commission to push any prospective bid from AT&T for DISH beyond the November 2012 election. However, with DISH noting in their results call that a refusal to grant the waiver could cause them to significantly change their plans, it will be very interesting to hear DISH’s reaction and see whether they will take this proposed deal off the table (for example by returning to the dual mode handset model contemplated by the original ATC rules), thereby torpedoing the FCC’s chances identifying 15MHz of additional spectrum to auction as Congress mandated last month.
FURTHER UPDATE (3/2): It sounds like the FCC is doing its best to reassure DISH that the outcome of the rulemaking is going to result in the band being redesignated for terrestrial-only services, and that a ruling will come before the end of the year. DISH’s response (with its reference to delaying “the advancement of some of President Obama’s and the FCC’s highest priorities”) appears to hint at the real reason for this delay, that after the LightSquared debacle, the White House simply doesn’t want any more trouble before the November 2012 election, and certainly doesn’t want to contend with an AT&T takeover bid for DISH in that timeframe.
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02.27.12
Posted in Financials, Inmarsat, LightSquared, Operators, Regulatory, Spectrum at 12:00 pm by timfarrar
According to this book, Americans are “the worst negotiators on Earth” and it appears that LightSquared are unlikely to prove the author wrong. I noted last week that LightSquared’s contract with Inmarsat apparently permitted Inmarsat to assert completion of its Phase 1 spectrum transition (under which it is paid $250M to fit filters to its terminals) without actually retrofitting any terminals. Specifically the Cooperation Agreement with Inmarsat signed in Dec 2007 states that:
In accordance with the provisions of this Agreement, each Party shall expedite the development of an implementation plan, which shall be coordinated with each of the other Parties, that will reflect all such actions as shall be necessary or advisable to effect the implementation of the L-band frequency ITU Region 2 use arrangements set forth in the respective Spectrum Plan, including, but not limited to (i) replacement or modification of user terminals, including in the case of the Phase 1 and Phase 2 Spectrum Plans, adding appropriate filters to all terminals operating on the Inmarsat system that might otherwise receive interference from or cause interference to the operation of the systems of the MSV Parties operating in accordance with this Agreement (or otherwise addressing such interference by other appropriate means, including at the absolute discretion of Inmarsat by discontinuance or replacement of any affected service or terminal)…
While at first sight it would appear that this clause requires Inmarsat to actually fit some filters, I believe that Inmarsat will argue they are given “absolute discretion” to simply replace any terminal that is affected by LightSquared’s operations, using the new filter technology it has developed, and of course no terminals will be affected if LightSquared never operate a terrestrial network.
In addition, Section 4.4 Payment on Completion of Implementation of Phase 1 Transition states:
The MSV Parties shall not be entitled to operate under the Phase 2 Spectrum Plan or benefit from the operational parameters set forth in Section 3.5 [ATC Operations] until such time as the payment under this Section 4.4 is made to Inmarsat.
Thus if LightSquared do not make the $56.25M payment that they skipped on February 18, they are not allowed under the terms of the Cooperation Agreement to actually operate a terrestrial (ATC) network. Of course its not only LightSquared’s agreement with Inmarsat that is a bad sign for potential investor recoveries after the inevitable bankruptcy filing, but also the status of its agreement with Sprint, as revealed today in Sprint’s 10-K for 2011, which states:
The arrangement contains contingencies related to possible interference issues with LightSquared’s spectrum, including the right of Sprint to terminate the arrangement if certain conditions are not met by LightSquared. As of December 31, 2011, the Company had received $310 million of advanced payments from LightSquared for future services to be performed under the spectrum hosting agreement.
Beginning in December 2011, through a series of amendments, the arrangement was modified to, among other things, extend the date in which Sprint has the right to terminate the arrangement and suspend Sprint’s obligation to incur any further cost or expense related to performance under the original agreement. Under the amended arrangement, Sprint, for any reason, including but not limited to FCC action or inaction, or no reason at all, may terminate the agreement after March 15, 2012 and before April 30, 2012. If LightSquared secures lender’s consent for modifications to the agreement, Sprint’s right to terminate will be deferred until June 25, 2012 and will continue through December 31, 2012. In addition, the parties definitively agreed that approximately $236 million of the total $310 million of advanced payments made by LightSquared represent payment for incremental costs or obligations incurred by Sprint under the original agreement in support of LightSquared. The parties agreed that this amount is irrevocably and unconditionally paid and will not be subject to dispute or claim by LightSquared. Accordingly, Sprint will refund up to approximately $74 million of Lightsquared’s initial prepayments, of which $65 million will be paid on the earlier of LightSquared’s lender’s consent or March 15, 2012, and the remaining $9 million will remain subject to the termination and unwind provisions of the original agreement and will be returned to LightSquared upon termination, less any additional incremental cost or obligations incurred by Sprint in support of LightSquared. In the event the arrangement is terminated for LightSquared’s material breach, non-payment or insolvency, Sprint maintains a second lien on certain of LightSquared’s assets, including spectrum assets.
Thus in December 2011, LightSquared definitively agreed to forfeit $236M of its advance payments to Sprint if they were unable to move forward which the agreement, which seems a huge sum of money when it appears Sprint had done basically nothing in terms of deployment apart from some initial network planning. Clearly LightSquared were deluding themselves as well as investors in December when they insisted that approval was going to be forthcoming in early 2012. However, this now puts further pressure on LightSquared to file for bankruptcy within the next two weeks, so that the December 15 revision to the Sprint agreement does not fall outside the 90 day bankruptcy window for review of recent contracts and payments.
Fundamentally I think that what both of these problems come down to is that in its negotiations LightSquared appear to have only considered the outcome if they were successful in deploying a network. I’m told that Inmarsat certainly focused most intently on the default provisions, because they always expected LightSquared to fail, and Sprint appear to have done likewise in demanding an upfront payment and then concentrating on retaining that money once LightSquared failed to get approval for their network. Both Harbinger and LightSquared were truly putting it all on red.
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