{"id":57571,"date":"2021-05-06T22:30:45","date_gmt":"2021-05-06T14:30:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/hughes-revenue-up-3-8-in-q1-despite-25k-subscriber-loss-in-the-us\/"},"modified":"2021-05-06T22:30:45","modified_gmt":"2021-05-06T14:30:45","slug":"hughes-revenue-up-3-8-in-q1-despite-25k-subscriber-loss-in-the-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/hughes-revenue-up-3-8-in-q1-despite-25k-subscriber-loss-in-the-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Hughes Revenue up 3.8% in Q1, Despite 25K Subscriber Loss in the US"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

Hughes Network Systems<\/strong> saw a 3.8% revenue increase in the first quarter of 2021, despite a dip in subscribers. During quarterly reports for parent company EchoStar Corporation<\/strong>, Hughes also provided an update that the Jupiter 3 satellite launch is still on track for launch in the second half of 2022. <\/p>\n

For the first quarter, EchoStar reported consolidated revenues of $483 million, an increase of 3.6% over the same time period in 2020, driven by higher sales of broadband services to our consumer customers. Net income increased $135.3 million to $77.6 million. The increase was primarily due to higher operating income and higher gains on investments<\/p>\n

Revenue attributable to Hughes \u2014 which makes up most of the company\u2019s revenue \u2014 was $476 million. The Hughes segment Adjusted EBITDA increased $39.7 million year-over-year, which the company said was driven by higher gross margin associated with the growth in its consumer broadband service revenue and lower selling, general, and administrative expenses.<\/p>\n

Yet this was the second quarter in a row of subscriber loss, after a string of increased subscribers earlier in 2020. Total Hughes broadband subscribers were 1,553,000 as of March 31, 2021. This is down 11,000 from the previous quarter. <\/p>\n

The decrease came from a decline in U.S. subscribers of 25,000 subs. This was offset by a boost in Latin America subscribers of 14,000. Total subscribers in the U.S. are at 1,164,000 and total subscribers in Latin America are at 389,000.<\/p>\n

Hughes President Pradman Kaul commented on the subscriber decrease in the U.S. during Thursday\u2019s investor call.<\/p>\n

\u201cSubscriber base in the United States declined by approximately 25,000 \u2014 but that\u2019s not the whole story,\u201d Kaul said. \u201cHughes retail ARPU continues to increase due to the high demand for broadband services. While we continue to operate at peak capacity, we are managing our sales activity to optimize service to our existing subs, and we expect these trends to continue in the near term.\u201d <\/p>\n

Kaul also said that the company has not seen an impact to date from SpaceX<\/strong>\u2019s Starlink internet beta testing: We\u2019ve had no impact to date obviously from [Starlink] because all they\u2019ve been doing is running a beta program. They haven\u2019t actually started implementing an operational program.\u201d <\/p>\n

The Jupiter 3 satellite will deliver more capacity to capacity-constrained North America after it launches in the second half of 2022. There were no further delays announced, and the launch date is in line with expectations from the previous quarter. The Jupiter 3 program has been pushed multiple times, and Kaul said that Hughes is working closely with manufacturer Maxar Technologies<\/b> to recover the schedule without risks to the satellite. <\/p>\n

Kaul said Hughes believes there is a large \u201cpent up demand\u201d for new subscribers for consumer broadband, and Hughes believes it will be able to quickly use the full capacity of Jupiter 3. <\/p>\n

Maxar CEO Dan Jablonsky commented on the Jupiter 3 build in the company\u2019s quarterly report earlier in the week. \u201cWe don\u2019t believe there are any development risks associated with the program anymore,\u201d Jablonsky said. \u201cThere is one particular vendor that\u2019s the bottleneck on one particular set of parts across the border. And we are working with them, and they\u2019ve been a little bit hampered by COVID. But the products are delivering. They\u2019re not delivering at the pace we had originally expected, but things are on track now.\u201d  <\/p>\n

Also in the investor call, Kaul addressed the recent Eutelsat<\/strong> investment of $550 million in OneWeb<\/strong>. He reiterated Hughes confidence in OneWeb, of which it is an investor, but would not comment further if Hughes is contemplating a greater investment in OneWeb\u2019s ongoing funding raise. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hughes Network Systems saw a 3.8% revenue increase in the first quarter of 2021, despite a dip in subscribers. During quarterly reports for parent company EchoStar Corporation, Hughes also provided an update that the Jupiter 3 satellite launch is still on track for launch in the second half of 2022.  For the first quarter, EchoStar […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":48168,"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-57571","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\/57571"}],"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=57571"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57571\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}