Iridium Communications Inc. (NASDAQ:IRDM) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript April 18, 2024
Iridium Communications Inc. misses on earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $0.1585 EPS, expectations were $0.16. Iridium Communications Inc. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Operator: Good morning, and welcome to the Iridium Communications First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] After the today’s presentation, there will be an opportunity to questions. [Operator Instructions] Please note today’s event is being recorded. I’d now like to turn the conference over to Kenneth Levy, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.
Kenneth Levy: Thanks, Rocco. Good morning, and welcome to Iridium’s first quarter 2024 earnings call. Joining me on the call this morning are our CEO, Matt Desch; and our CFO, Tom Fitzpatrick. Today’s call will begin with a discussion of our first quarter results, followed by Q&A. I trust you’ve had an opportunity to review this morning’s earnings release, which is available on the Investor Relations section of Iridium’s website. Before I turn things over to Matt, I’d like to caution all participants that our call may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical fact and include statements about our future expectations, plans, and prospects.
Such forward-looking statements are based upon our current beliefs and expectations and are subject to risks, which could cause actual results to differ from forward-looking statements. Such risks are more fully discussed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Our remarks today should be considered in light of such risks. Any forward-looking statements represent our views only as of today. And while we may elect to update forward-looking statements at some point in the future, we specifically disclaim any obligation to do so, even if our views or expectations change. During the call, we’ll also be referring to certain non-GAAP financial measures, including operational EBITDA, pro forma free cash flow, free cash flow yield, and free cash flow conversion.
These non-GAAP financial measures are not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. Please refer to today’s earnings release and the Investor Relations section of our website for further explanation of these non-GAAP financial measures and a reconciliation to the most directly comparable GAAP measures. With that, let me turn things over to Matt.
Matthew Desch: Thanks, Ken, and good morning, everyone. So the first quarter often sets the tone for the rest of the year and activity to-date has been upbeat and quite strong. Service revenue continues to expand on our growing subscriber base and our partner ecosystem remains quite dynamic whether it’d be an IoT, maritime, aviation, or defense. We remain busy as well since the beginning of the year with a lot of new product development and the completion of our first-ever company acquisition on April 1. We met with a number of you during the many investor conferences in March and have been active in the debt market with our tack-on financing to upsize our term loan to complete the Satelles acquisition. We’re really excited about this transaction and the business opportunities that bringing Satelles in-house provides Iridium and our partners.
With this acquisition, we’ll go from just a wholesaler of Satelles to secure signals to an end-to-end solution provider of PNT services for customers globally. For those who are not yet familiar with this new business area, this acquisition makes us the leader in satellite-based time synchronization and location services that complement and protect GPS and other GNSS systems. As the world increasingly has come to realize, the prevalence of GPS jamming and location spoofing during conflicts and for general mischief is on the rise and is impacting critical infrastructure, military operations, aircraft and shipping navigation, and other important functions for governments and enterprises around the world. Iridium’s expanding PNT solutions can cost-effectively reduce these vulnerabilities and provide an alternative to GPS reliance, particularly for critical infrastructure that we all depend upon.
Going forward, this new business offering will be referred to as Iridium Satellite Time and Location, or STL, for short, and be reported within our hosted payload and other revenue line. The entire 70 person Satelles team is being integrated into Iridium as the PNT business unit, and Mike O’Connor, who is the CEO of Satelles will report to me as the leader of that business. We anticipate that STL will generate over $100 million in service revenue per year by 2030, with additional revenue on top of that from equipment and engineering services. These PNT solutions ride on Iridium’s LEO constellation and utilize small, very low-cost hardware. With a secure signal that is 1,000 times stronger than GPS, Iridium STL can even be used indoors to add redundancy and protection to data centers in building wireless networks and other critical infrastructure.
Best of all, STL is sold as a wide area broadcast service that can support an unlimited number of users while using minimal capacity on our network. These applications are already proving their worth in the market today, and we think we enjoy at least a five year to 10 year head start on other viable solutions that are global and have the resiliency of a space-based approach like ours. With Iridium’s broad and growing ecosystem of partners, we expect that STL will be able to address many additional customer challenges in maritime, aviation, the UAV market, protecting energy grids, as well as some innovative new applications in areas like cybersecurity. I hope you can sense my excitement for this transaction. It’s strategically in line with Iridium’s priorities and vision, doing things that are unique, special, and important from our LEO L-band network and better than anyone else can do.
We’re ready now to step on the gas and expand the availability of Iridium STL to new markets and customers. You will recall from our September Investor Day that I laid out a number of vectors that would support Iridium generating $1 billion in service revenue by 2030 and supporting our capacity to return $3 billion of capital to shareholders over this same eight-year period. Let me be clear, there have been no competitive developments since last year’s Investor Day that changed our view on our long-term financial outlook. STL is one of the financial drivers that supports this plan and is a great tuck-in acquisition that will create synergies across our other market vectors. For those who had the opportunity to tune into our conference presentations during the first quarter, you’ve heard us reiterate many of these long-term growth drivers.
It should come as no surprise that the largest opportunities we see for revenue growth through the end of the decade come from services we already know very well and are already working on. To achieve our long-term growth objectives, we don’t have to change our strategy or wholesale business model. Instead, it will be more of the same. We will stay in our lane, grow our network of business partners, execute on product launches and innovation, and deliver on our unique strengths. This is our objective and we have a pretty good track record of delivering. Beyond Satelles and other potential tuck-in acquisitions, we highlighted four other drivers during our September Investor Day that are key to Iridium’s revenue growth in the coming years. First, IoT.
We are the leader in personal satellite communications as well as industrial IoT, and we continue to believe that double-digit revenue and subscriber growth we have produced in these commercial applications will continue for the foreseeable future. You can see that really demonstrated again in our first quarter results. Second, midband. Leveraging our leadership in IoT, we will continue to move forward with partners to roll out new applications and devices that take full advantage of our very unique Iridium Certus platform that is optimized for size, speed, mobility, and takes full advantage of our L-band spectrum position. Highly mobile, power-efficient devices using Iridium’s midband services, which support speeds up to about 100 kilobits per second in a small form factor, will drive IoT ARPUs and open Iridium services up to new industries.
Some of these devices have already entered the marketplace, and we envision Iridium’s midband services will offer added functionality and connected solutions to industries like security and surveillance, autonomous vehicle, and other remote applications that demand higher bandwidth, but still need mobility or operate on batteries and are often small and need to be lightweight. Third, Direct-to-Device. You previously heard me speak of our investment in Project Stardust. This is a multi-year investment that will make Iridium technology available to chipset manufacturers adopting new satellite oriented 3GPP standards for IoT devices and consumer devices like smartphones. This is a very large market and our work will expand our IoT opportunities into a broader set of cost sensitive industries.
Lastly, Telephony. We strongly believe that satellite-based personal communication devices have a bright future even as we and others develop direct-to-device capabilities. I want to underscore that Telephony is an important revenue source for us with more than 400,000 users of per purpose-built voice devices of all types on our network, and we expect that number to continue to grow into the future. These devices are mainstays for first responders, governments, and loan workers and they become so completely integrated in their operations because of their reliability, global reach, and the challenging environments in which they are used. They allow organizations to plan and execute without interruption and ensure that communications facilitate the accomplishment of goal rather than hindering it.
The advent of high quality push-to-talk services over the last five years is a proof-point of these purpose-built devices and remains a driver of expanding the subscriber base and revenue Iridium continues to see in this area. Historically, Iridium has served the needs of niche and specialized communities of users. And while we are proud to have grown this niche to more than 2.3 million subscribers globally, I assure you we are far from finished. My team constantly questions the status quo and given our history, has a healthy humility and even an appropriate level of paranoia about the continued leadership position we have attained in the satellite industry. Some investors seem to be skeptical about our future right now, but we think they underestimate the utility of our global services, misunderstand the needs of the particular customers we serve, and are discounting the capabilities of our network relative to others in the satellite sector.
We are highly confident in our long-term revenue drivers and capital generation through 2030, and we have a lot of visibility into the fundamentals of our business. The vast majority of our revenue is recurring, what we refer to as service revenue. While we do not require our service to be sold with long-term contracts, our customers often opt to purchase iridium solutions for years at a time. In fact, they’ve often tried other L-band offerings prior to settling on Iridium’s network, and they choose our service because it provides a level of reliability, coverage, and customer support that they cannot get elsewhere. I’m proud of this fact and encourage investors to validate this with their own due diligence. We continue to show our commitment to return capital to shareholders.
In the first quarter, we were active with our repurchase program and continued with our quarterly dividend. As we noted in February, our Board will increase Iridium’s dividend starting with our June payment. This will result in a dividend increase that is equivalent to about 6% in 2024. These programs underscore our confidence in Iridium’s continued business growth and the strength of our enterprise to generate free cash flow. I would be remiss not to touch on Iridium’s stock price and the market’s current assessment of our equity valuation. While Iridium is a satellite service provider, we don’t operate or look like anyone else in the satellite industry. I would go so far to say that this group is not who we should be compared to for valuation purposes.
Other satellite operators have continued to see competition grow and seen their fundamentals deteriorate. With perhaps one or two exceptions, they don’t generate free cash flow like we do, don’t have growing service revenue and subscribers like we do, and surely none can claim to have the unique network and business profile that we do. We continue to believe that Iridium is more comparable to other companies generating both growth and free cash flow. We encourage investors to look at Iridium’s levered free cash flow to evaluate the strength of our business and assess the relative value of our common shares. When considering measures like free cash flow yield and conversion, we believe that Iridium continues to stack up quite well against the tower sector and data centers, some of which trade at twice our enterprise value to OEBITDA multiple.
We believe our competitive dynamics are also similar to these infrastructure companies and that we occupy a unique business space and have strong visibility to future growth. As such, we believe that the underlying strength and growth of our business should be rewarded with a higher valuation. Perhaps some of the decrease in our valuation comes from the market’s overall concerns for the space industry in general and disruption impacting VSAT players. I would remind you that Iridium faces a very different competitive environment and set of business opportunities than the commodity broadband players in the VSAT industry. In fact, we have been deliberate in avoiding commodity services like VSAT broadband and are focusing on being the L-band safety complement to VSAT and other K-band broadband services.
Our L-band ensures that mariners can operate globally and reliably in the face of weather, where service is unavailable, or in ports, where VSAT services are restricted. And later this year, our companion Iridium Certus broadband terminal will be able to provide the mandated GMDSS function as well. We continue to believe our shares offer a compelling value today based on our fundamentals. We are converting on business opportunities, adding subscribers, growing revenue, and adding new avenues of growth. We remain an active buyer of our shares and continue to believe our equity is an attractive investment for investors looking to outperform the broader industry. As we have previously said, we don’t expect to spend any CapEx on a next-generation satellite constellation through 2030.
We expect that when we do commence spending post-2030, it will ramp slowly as we shouldn’t need to launch satellites until the latter half of the 2030s. As we contrast the amount and profile of spending with our anticipated OEBITDA during the construction period, we expect to generate meaningful levered free cash flow throughout a next-generation constellation build. This will support continued share repurchases and a growing dividend throughout the future construction period. So Iridium has a healthy balance sheet, strong business fundamentals and is positioned well for growth. We see no new competitive developments impacting our outlook or long-term guidance. As we have said during last year’s Investor Day, Iridium expects to have the capacity to return approximately $3 billion to shareholders through 2030.
This represents just about 100% of the company’s equity market value as of this morning. You must admit that’s an extraordinary fact at this time. Everything we see supports our outlook for continued growth and achieving our long-term vision. While the market may not appreciate this at the moment, we expect that to eventually correct as we continue to execute, expand on our unique opportunities of our network and return capital to our shareholders along the way. With that, I’ll turn it over to Tom for a review of our financials. Tom?
Thomas Fitzpatrick: Thanks, Matt, and good morning, everyone. I’d like to start my remarks by summarizing our key financial metrics for the first quarter and providing some color on the trends we’re seeing in our major business lines. Then, I’ll recap the 2024 guidance, which we affirmed this morning, and close with a review of our liquidity position and capital structure. Iridium continued to execute well, delivering another quarter of subscriber growth and strong service revenue expansion. Operational EBITDA was $115 million in the first quarter. This was a 3% increase from last year’s quarter, driven by growth in recurring revenue. On the commercial side of our business, service revenue was up 8% this quarter to $122.1 million.
This increase was broad-based and reflected continued strength in voice and data and IoT as Matt mentioned. Voice and data revenue rose 5% from last year’s comparable quarter to $55 million. The increase was largely driven by subscriber growth as we continue to benefit from strong demand for our push-to-talk services. The one-to-many services push-to-talk has widespread application in organizations that coordinate and respond to dangerous and changing circumstances like first responders, safety organizations, and government entities. Commercial IoT revenue totaled $39.4 million in the first quarter, up 23% from the prior year quarter. It was favorably impacted by a new two-year contract with a large, fast growing partner. This new contract has the effect of materially increasing revenue from this customer in 2024 compared to 2023.
It also results in revenue being recognized approximately equally in each of the four quarters of 2024. In prior years, revenue was recognized as subscriber counts ramped throughout the year and as seasonal usage picked up in the second and third quarters. That will not be the case under the new contract as we have agreed to a more deterministic approach to pricing with this large customer, which creates more certainty for both of us. As a result of this contract change, the quarter’s — this quarter’s revenue growth will compare most favorably to our lowest prior year revenue quarter, and future quarters will show somewhat lower year-over-year growth in this quarter. Given the certainty of these contractual revenues and with positive developments across a broad range of other IoT customer segments, including personal communications, heavy equipment OEMs, fleet management and aviation, we expect full year IoT revenue to exceed the 13% growth rate experienced in 2022 and 2023.
Accordingly, we are guiding IoT revenue growth in the mid-teens in 2024. IoT is a central plank in Iridium’s billion-dollar service revenue target for 2030. Developments in 2024 in IoT bolster our confidence in achieving this long-term target. Revenue in commercial broadband grew 2% from the year ago period, $13.7 million. As we have previously noted, we are seeing the effect of commodity broadband pricing in a limited portion of our broadband business. We expect this impact to be short-lived and expect growth in broadband in 2025 to improve from 2024, as we are routinely used as a backup to VSAT and all K-band players. This impact was anticipated in our $1 billion service revenue target for 2030. I would point out that while broadband was not one of our five central planks identified for growth in our September 2023 Investor Day, we do expect respectable growth in this area over the period.
During the quarter, we added 54,000 net new commercial subscribers. Commercial IoT data subscribers now represent 81% of billable commercial subscribers, up from 79% in the year ago period. We estimate that consumer-oriented plans now account for more than 930,000 of our 1.8 million commercial IoT users. Hosting and other data services revenue was $14 million this quarter, down 7% from last year’s comparable quarter. As we outlined during our last call, we increased the estimated useful life of our satellites by an additional five years based upon the health of these assets. This extension of the satellite’s useful life extends the time over which we recognize revenue from our fixed price hosting contracts. It’s important for me to reiterate that this accounting update does not affect our cash flow.
Government service revenue was stable in the first quarter at $26.5 million, reflecting the terms of our EMSS contract with the U.S. government. Subscriber equipment, which is coming off two years of record sales driven by partner supply chain stock-up related to the pandemic, is now returning to more normalized levels. We sold $24.9 million in hardware in the first quarter and continue to expect equipment sales this year will be more in line with historical levels. Engineering and support revenue was $30.4 million in the first quarter as compared to $24.2 million in the prior year period. The increase reflects growing activity related to our government work for the Space Development Agency, a contract that we won in 2022. We continue to forecast year-over-year growth in engineering revenue in 2024, and again expect growth in 2025, based upon an increase in the scope of work and new business opportunities with the SDA.
Our first quarter results as well as the trends we are seeing into April allow us to affirm our full year guidance on service revenue and EBITDA. In support of this outlook, I want to highlight a few items that may be relevant to your models. We remain comfortable with our outlook for service revenue growth between 4% and 6% in 2024. This equates to a 5% to 7% range without the accounting update related to our satellites. The Satelles acquisition, which we completed earlier this month is accretive to our previous revenue guidance for service revenue growth of between 4% and 6%. However, we expect the effect to be less than 100 basis points in 2024. So we are reiterating our previous guidance this morning, but now see ourselves higher in the stated range after giving effect to the acquisition.
Commercial voice and IoT data continue to enjoy strong momentum and drive much of Iridium service revenue growth in 2024. Revenue from our U.S. Government EMSS contract will remain steady at $26.5 million per quarter in the first half of 2024 and will rise with a contractual step-up in September. Full year revenue in the government business will be $106.3 million in 2024. Equipment sales will moderate this year with revenue expected to revert to pre-pandemic levels as the channel absorbs safety stock it accumulated during the pandemic. On the expense side of the ledger, SG&A is expected to remain stable in 2024, while R&D spending will nudge up about $5 million to support our Stardust initiative on NB-IoT and direct-to-device. Depreciation and amortization will decrease by about $83 million in 2024.
This is entirely related to the change of satellite useful life, which I touched upon earlier. Iridium expects cash taxes of less than $10 million in 2024. This minimal level incorporates additional R&D credits we expect to realize through ’26. Taken together, these trends allow us to reiterate our forecast for service revenue growth between 4% and 6%, an operational EBITDA between $460 million and $470 million this year. We feel very good about the momentum we’re seeing across our businesses. Moving to our capital position, as of March 31, Iridium had a cash and cash equivalents balance of $174 million. Iridium received cash of approximately $125 million as a result of an increase in the term loan, which was used to fund the Satelles acquisition in early April.
You’ll see the full impact on our cash balance of this transaction when we report on our second quarter results. Term Loan B tack-on funding was completed at an OID of 99 and 7As (ph) and with the same terms as Iridium’s existing facility. We’re very happy with these terms and appreciate the confidence the debt community continues to show in Iridium. As of March 31, Iridium’s term loan balance increased to $1.62 billion to reflect this new funding. When we report out our second quarter results, you’ll see the full impact of this transaction on our balance sheet, which will have the effect of increasing Iridium’s net leverage to approximately 3.4 times of EBITDA. As we’ve said previously, we think Iridium naturally delevers over time and expect net leverage to fall below 2.5 times OEBITDA as we exit 2026 and be below 2 times of EBITDA by the end of the decade.
This outlook gives effect to our planned dividend program and all share buybacks authorized by our board. In the first quarter of 2024, Iridium retired approximately 1.8 million shares of common stock at an average price of $30.41. This left us with an outstanding balance of $277.4 million under our Board approved authorization through December 31, 2025. During the first quarter, we also made a quarterly dividend payment of $0.13 per share paid on March 28. Beginning in the second quarter of 2024, Iridium’s Board will increase Iridium’s quarterly dividend to $0.14 per share, representing an increase of approximately 6% over the full year 2023. This reflects our confidence in the company’s business opportunities and prospects for continued strong free cash flow generation.
Capital expenditures in the first quarter were $14.6 million. As we noted on our fourth quarter call in February, we expect capital expenditures to average $60 million annually through 2030. CapEx will be over $60 million in the next couple of years as we invest in new product development initiatives like Project Stardust and then trend below $60 million in the latter part of the decade. Turning to our pro forma free cash flow. If we use the midpoint of our 2024 EBITDA guidance and back off $84 million in net interest pro forma for our current debt structure, approximately $69 million in CapEx for this year, $5 million in cash taxes and $6 million in working capital inclusive of the appropriate hosted payload adjustment, we’re projecting pro forma free cash flow of approximately $301 million for 2024.
These metrics would represent a conversion rate of EBITDA to free cash flow of 65% in 2024, and a yield of approximately 10%. A more detailed description of these cash flow metrics, along with a reconciliation to GAAP measures is available in a supplemental presentation under events on our Investor Relations website. In general, we’re happy with the performance of our business and believe that Iridium continues to make solid progress on the long-term growth initiative it laid out at the 2023 Investor Day. I also want to echo Matt’s comments on our equity valuation. Iridium stands in stark contrast to the other satellite companies and occupies a truly differentiated position. We will generate approximately $300 million in free cash flow in 2024, and it will grow from here.
We should not be compared to other satellite companies, who face direct competitive challenges and many of whom don’t even generate positive free cash flow. With that, I’ll turn things back to the operator and look forward to your questions.
See also 30 Least Developed Countries in Africa in 2024 and 30 Countries with the Highest Vulnerable Employment in the World.
To continue reading the Q&A session, please click here.