[08-06-12] ViaSat<\/b> CEO Mark Dankberg warned investors that the company\u2019s commercial networks segment would continue to generate losses in 2013 despite its 46 percent increase in the 2013 first quarter. In ViaSat\u2019s latest financial results issued Aug. 3, Dankberg said that the 2013 first quarter would likely represent the worst percentages of expenses surpassing subscriber revenue from its new Exede broadband service.<\/p>\n
Although ViaSat\u2019s quarterly revenues increased 24 percent to $242 million and beat analysts expectations by 5 percent, ViaSat missed the consensus EBITDA forecast of $38.4 million by nearly $9 million. The company\u2019s satellite services EBITDA dropped approximately 80 percent from $20.8 million in the same period last year to $4.4 million despite seemingly in-line subscriber adds and acquisition costs.
\n Dankberg said higher selling, general and administrative expenses and a still-evolving consumer model contributed to the poor performance, but added that he expects sequential improvement moving forward.
\n \u201cIn our satellite services segment, we are focused on the primary mission of adding subscribers, assessing the addressable market and confirming the unit economics that will transition us to profitable growth in subsequent periods,\u201d said Dankberg. \u201cWhile total subscriber acquisition costs are the primary driver of our higher operating loss for the quarter, our unit economics for acquiring new subscribers and servicing existing ones are consistent with our models \u2014 positioning us for steady sequential growth in adjusted EBITDA and earnings beginning in our fiscal second quarter.\u201d
\n ViaSat activated approximately 66,000 new subscriptions during the three-month period \u2014 a 35 percent increase from the previous quarter. The company\u2019s net customer addition mark of 20,000, however, was well below the market forecast of 44,000 due to continued high migration off its legacy WildBlue services.
\n The company did report a 23 percent year-over-year government segment revenue increase, representing the segment\u2019s best performance in more than three years. ViaSat also achieved record orders and backlog in the quarter, despite a difficult budgetary environment in the government segment.
\n Dankberg said that while the budget is a \u201cwildcard\u201d in its government segment, cost pressures have caused customers to turn to ViaSat for comms-on-the-move solutions. Raymond James<\/b> Analyst Chris Quilty said he expects ViaSat\u2019s profitability in this segment to slowly improve as consumer modem shipments ramp and research and development investments moderate in time. Quilty also remains cautious on the company\u2019s long-term outlook.
\n \u201cWhile we like ViaSat\u2019s long-term consumer opportunity, we believe that consensus growth expectations are still too high in light of ViaSat\u2019s still-unresolved wholesale\/retail distribution strategy and unproven retail profitability model,\u201d Quilty said in an Aug. 3 research note.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[08-06-12] ViaSat CEO Mark Dankberg warned investors that the company\u2019s commercial networks segment would continue to generate losses in 2013 despite its 46 percent increase in the 2013 first quarter. In ViaSat\u2019s latest financial results issued Aug. 3, Dankberg said that the 2013 first quarter would likely represent the worst percentages of expenses surpassing subscriber […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"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-82684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82684"}],"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=82684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82684\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}