Matt Desch
Analyst · William Blair. Your line is open
Thanks, Steve. Good morning, everyone. I'll start by highlighting that based on our first quarter performance and the view for the rest of the year, we have affirmed our 2015 and long range financial guidance. For the quarter, which is a typically slow one for us, total service revenue grew 3% with key contributions coming from our U.S. Government and commercial M2M lines of business. As we expected, equipment revenue was down in the first quarter, owing largely to the ongoing impact of a strong dollar in our international markets. Specifically our voice market continues to see this currency pressure reducing handset sales and related usage. Tom will have more on these trends later on in his comments. I'll be brief today as we just hosted a very comprehensive Analyst Day in mid March, which many of you attended or listened to on the webcast. If you didn't attend or have not had the opportunity to review the presentation on our Investor Relations website, I encourage you to do so. It's a most comprehensive update we've given about our business since our last Analyst Day in 2010 and we also had the opportunity to showcase Iridium's Executive Leadership Team. I would like to thank the investment community again for attending and making it a great day and that the strong survey results we received was an indication of the success I think was a time well spent by all. Most importantly, we were able to emphasize that our investment case is about the long term. Specifically the financial transformation we should see through 2018 and the great potential for the company beyond that. It's pretty straightforward when you break it down into its key components. We expect that significantly higher operational EBITDA combined with materially lower CapEx will generate significant free cash flow and ultimately long-term value creation for our stakeholders. Furthermore this investment cases were rooted in five growth pillars that lift our service revenue in coming years and you've heard a lot about these too. Let me remind you of these pillars. Number one, the U.S. Government is a backbone of our profile with its $400 million five-year fixed price airtime contract. Number two, our lucrative hosted payload business namely, the financial contributions from Aireon and Harris. Number three, new products including Iridium GO! and commercial push-to-talk. Number four, M2M, which is the fastest growing business in our portfolio and now represents nearly half of our subscribers and over 25% of our commercial service revenue and number five, our newest engine of future growth, Iridium Certus broadband. We and our world-class partners will bring new faster user terminals to market in the coming years to take advantage of Iridium NEXT enhanced capabilities. Taking all those together, that we're poised to transform our cash flow profile and be a much different and even more valuable enterprise over the next three years. With that just a few quick thoughts on the status of our network, developments in our Iridium NEXT program, recent news of our Aireon joint venture and an update on our major lines of business. The first topic is the ongoing health and resilience of our current network. I am happy to again report that it's performing at the top level and we've had no satellite losses thus far in 2015 or in the last eight months. It continues to provide 100% global coverage, excellent performance statistics and the user experience is getting ever better as we make improvements and add new software to the network to provide additional services. It's been the foundation of our success and will continue to be so until Iridium NEXT program is finished. In regard to Iridium NEXT, our capital budget is unchanged at approximately $3 billion and we've spent about half of that through the first quarter of 2015. The overall schedule remains on track for network completion in 2017. We continue to target our first plan launch in October of this year. As many of you observed during the facilities tour portion of our Analyst Day last month, the Orbital Sciences factory, where the satellites are being built in Arizona is humming with activity. The first two satellites that will be launched at Dnepr rocket are being built and tested there and the factory is steadily gearing up for high rate production, which will allow them to manufacture three to four satellites per month as our launch pace speeds up in 2016. Our partners also continue to produce key flight components in quantity including the Aireon payloads, on-board processor, Main Mission Antenna and spacecraft bus to support the move to high rate production. In addition, I can report that we recently successfully performed the first traffic load test on the new satellites, which is just one in a series on ongoing testing and validation steps as we get closer to launching the new satellites. As we're getting our satellites into orbit, SpaceX, our primary launch services provider, continues to build on its perfect record. They're now 18-for-18 with their Falcon 9 platform dating back to 2010 with their latest satellite delivery mission just a few days ago. This was their fourth successful launch this year, showing they're really picking up the pace against a busy manifest. On the Dnepr platform, which again is launching just our first two satellites, production is now complete for the qualification dispenser. The dispenser of the assembly that holds the satellites during rocket launch and releases them into orbit. Dispenser qualification testing is on track for completion in June 2015, Our Aireon joint venture also continues to build momentum. It recently signed agreements to collaborate on the potential deployment of space based global aviation monitoring with the Air Traffic Management Agency of India as well as the BLUE MED Functional Airspace Block, a cooperative of ANSPs that control air space in the Mediterranean. These agreements similar to the ones announced earlier in the year with Singapore's air traffic management agency and ASECNA of Central Africa lay the groundwork for future data service contracts and expand the planned deployment of Aireon service in Asia and Europe. Ultimately, Aireon is working to secure strategic flight quarters around the globe that will drive significant operational benefits and fuel savings for the airlines. Moving now to a quick update on our major lines of business; in our legacy telephony business, despite pressure on both equipment sales and usage from a challenging foreign exchange environment and reduced activity in the energy sector on lower oil prices, we're incentivizing customers with new offers and tailored rate plans to meet our sales targets. In the first quarter and the full year, at least in the early going, are coming off pretty much where we thought and we still believe the commercial voice sector is a low single digit grower for Iridium over the long term. Aiding that growth profile will be new products including our commercial push-to-talk solution. This service will be more widely available during the second quarter and will be seen as the first revenue start to flow from a robust customer funnel. As affordable product, build on our Iridium Extreme as a dual purpose handset, we see many attractive used cases for this solution. From remote work teams in the forestry industry to first responders and government agencies coordinating their efforts in the wake of a natural disaster. Overall we expect it will add to our commercial service and equipment revenue in 2015 and beyond. In M2M, we continue to drive solid performance in our traditional vertical markets by expanding our partner base and reducing hardware cost, while also developing opportunities in the utilities, automotive and enterprise trucking sectors. The heavy equipment OEM space is still a major target area for us and we've been successful over the last two years bringing new business on Board. We have a strong funnel and expect that we will be announcing new customer wins in 2015. As for our broadband platforms in aviation and maritime, we continue to see nice gains. In the Commercial Aviation segment, our subscribers grew about 20% year-over-year in the first quarter and we've experienced particularly strong adoption among Chinese Airlines as they look to use our service to meet the national mandate for satellite voice communications in the cockpit. We're leveraging our size, weight and cost advantages when selling to this market with a strong focus on aircraft operation and communications and flight safety applications. On the maritime side, we increased Iridium open port service revenue versus last year with solid data usage on ships and vessels driving growth. The competitive landscape remains favorable for us to build market share as the value player and we'll seek to capitalize on this momentum by optimizing our pricing, aggressively pursuing new fleet wins and driving data usage across the network. Finally, as you heard on our last earnings call and in detail during the Analyst Day, we plan to expand our broadband footprint from here. With the recent announcement of Iridium Certus broadband, we partner with five world-class manufacturers to develop faster user terminals for the aviation maritime and land sectors that will take advantage of Iridium NEXT enhanced capabilities. The industry is hungry for the reliable low latency and high speed service that Iridium NEXT will provide and our partners have development underway and to that end we expect to deliver our core technology, the prototype transceivers for their terminals during the second quarter. In closing, there is a high level of activity at Iridium these days. 2015 is shaping up to be another exciting year. We're working hard to meet our first launch date this year and complete Iridium NEXT in 2017. Our commercial lines of business are in attack mode despite some challenging external factors and we continue to strengthen our service revenue profile with new products and services. Most importantly, our investment thesis and our view to the financial transformation that should occur in 2018 are solidly intact. So with that, I'll turn it over to Tom for a more detailed financial review. Tom?