Iridium Communications<\/b> will hit $1 billion in annual service revenue in 2030, CEO Matt Desch projected during the company\u2019s investor day presentation on Thursday, setting a bold revenue target for the company. Desch said this revenue growth over the next seven years has the capacity for $3 billion in shareholder returns through 2030.<\/p>\n
The company reported $721 million in revenue in 2022, and has been on a nine-year revenue growth streak. Iridium is in the midst of a CapEx holiday after completing its network upgrade, and the company won\u2019t need to spend money on a next-generation network until at least 2031, Desch said. <\/p>\n
Shedding light on the company\u2019s outlook on acquisitions, Desch said the company is not particularly interested in M&A and doesn\u2019t need to make acquisitions for inorganic growth. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re definitely not interested in acquiring partners,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a challenging way to screw up your go-to-market model. We think that the way we go to market, the relationship [and] growth we have with new partners has been optimal. We\u2019re not going to pick off lower-margin solutions.\u201d <\/p>\n
Instead, Iridium is considering its own investment in narrowband IoT [NB IoT], for use cases like agriculture and asset tracking. Desch described this type of IoT as low average revenue per user, high latency with low cost end user devices, different from the company\u2019s \u201cpremium IoT.\u201d This is the type of connectivity that satellite IoT startups are going after, and Desch pointed to consolidation in that market, and the challenges running some of those businesses. SpaceX acquired Swarm, for example, but ended IoT device sales. <\/p>\n
Iridium sees long-term product promise in the NB IoT standard. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe have the most powerful network already,\u201d Desch said. \u201cIf we could implement 5G narrowband IoT directly on our network, that would be the most efficient way [into this market, versus] putting a small investment into one of these companies that may or may not be successful.\u201d<\/p>\n
Absent an official announcement, Desch said Iridium is in the \u201cvery early stages\u201d of looking at this approach. He said if Iridium were to make a move in this area, it would be the \u201csuperior\u201d offering because of Iridium\u2019s low latency and large partner ecosystem. <\/p>\n
To reach $1 billion in service revenue in 2030, Desch outlined a number of growth vectors: IoT and personal communications; direct-to-device; voice and push-to-talk; midband; broadband; U.S. government service; alternative PNT; and investments and acquisitions. He highlighted Iridium\u2019s current investments in Aireon and Satelles and DDK. <\/p>\n
The company\u2019s biggest area of growth is IoT and Iridium has over 4 million IoT modules on its network, Desch said. He particularly highlighted potential in the land mobile and heavy equipment sector, reporting that Iridium has deals with more than half of the top 25 heavy equipment OEMs around the world. <\/p>\n
There were no updates in the direct-to-device area, Iridium is looking to its partner Qualcomm on what smartphone manufacturers will adopt the satellite-to-cell chip. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re quite excited about global SOS and messaging services,\u201d Desch said. \u201cWe believe they\u2019re going to be required for devices on a regional basis. Definitely, Apple is driving the market and we think that others are going to have to react to differentiate.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
Correction: A previous version of this story gave an incorrect name for one of Iridium\u2019s investments. Iridium is invested in Satelles.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Iridium Communications will hit $1 billion in annual service revenue in 2030, CEO Matt Desch projected during the company\u2019s investor day presentation on Thursday, setting a bold revenue target for the company. Desch said this revenue growth over the next seven years has the capacity for $3 billion in shareholder returns through 2030. The company […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":48300,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52718"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52718"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52718\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}