Earnings Labs

Viasat, Inc. (VSAT)

Q1 2017 Earnings Call· Wed, Aug 10, 2016

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Welcome to the ViaSat's FY 2017 First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. Your host for today's call is Mark Dankberg, Chairman and CEO. You may proceed, Mr. Dankberg. Mark D. Dankberg - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Okay. Thanks. Good afternoon, everybody, and thanks for joining our earnings conference call for our first fiscal quarter of 2017. So, I'm Mark Dankberg, Chairman and CEO. And I've got with me here, Rick Baldridge, our President, Chief Operating Officer; Shawn Duffy, our Chief Financial Officer; Keven Lippert, our General Counsel; and Bruce Dirks, our Treasurer. And before we start, Keven will provide our Safe Harbor disclosure. Keven K. Lippert - Executive Vice President, General Counsel & Secretary: Thanks, Mark. As you know, this discussion will contain forward-looking statements. This is a reminder that factors could cause actual results to differ materially. Additional information concerning these factors is contained in our SEC filings including our most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. Copies are available from the SEC or from our website. With that said, back to you, Mark. Mark D. Dankberg - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Okay. So, we'll be referring to slides that are available over the web. And I'll start with some highlights and a top level business overview and after that, Shawn will go through the consolidated and segment level financial results. And in this quarter, we thought we'd spend a little time reviewing how we think about our R&D investments in satellite broadband productivity, and give some color about how that productivity manifests itself in our key broadband services businesses, including an update on the R&D status on ViaSat-2 and ViaSat-3. And then, we will review our outlook and take questions. So, our first quarter was a pretty good start for the year. Overall, revenue was…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our first question comes from the line of Rich Valera from Needham & Company. Your line is now open. Richard Valera - Needham & Co. LLC: Thank you. I appreciate the color on the pre-and post ViaSat-2 with the different businesses, Mark. Just wondering if you thought that migration might become a factor again post launch of ViaSat-2 as they were when you initially launched ViaSat-1? Mark D. Dankberg - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yes, we do. We listed that as one of the factors. I think that it's going to be much less of a factor than it was with ViaSat-1. For the main reason that the difference in the satellite productivity is narrower than it was between WildBlue-1 and in ViaSat-1. So they were looking at like a 10x, 20x increase in productivity and this is more or like double or maybe a little better than that. So there will be some but we think it ought to be more manageable based on the way we defined the services. Richard Valera - Needham & Co. LLC: Okay. Is there any way we could think about that? I think you peaked at like 60K a year in the first year of that transition, so sort of a significant factor less than that is how we should think about it when we think about the first year...? Mark D. Dankberg - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: I think the way I'd think about it is one of the ways and we talked about this a couple of quarters ago is think about it as we improve the productivity, we can use some of that bandwidth gain to improve the surface as one of the big factor and then another part to improve our margins. So think…

Operator

Operator

And our next question comes from line of Andrew DeGasperi from Macquarie. Your line is now open. Andrew DeGasperi - Macquarie Capital (USA), Inc.: Thanks. Macquarie. First question, can you maybe clarify for us, what the FCC Spectrum Frontiers order impact is to ViaSat-2 or ViaSat-3 potentially in the 28 gigahertz band? Mark D. Dankberg - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yeah. We obviously follow that. We paid a lot of attention to that. We have been probably the leading proponent of spectrum sharing in the satellite industry. I think that put us in kind of a leadership position and – in the discussions around that. And also, we've been probably ahead of the curve in taking advantage of spectrum sharing in that 28 gigahertz band. So at the end, I think that the statements that the FCC made around what their intentions were are good for 5G and for the satellite industry. They acknowledged the issues around grandfathering the teleport gateways for existing satellite systems, including for ViaSat-1 and ViaSat-2, and there are provisions for many thousands of new gateways throughout the U.S. for ViaSat-3 and beyond, using that 28 gigahertz spectrum band. The FCC also acknowledged that there was need for further study to deal with both the local interference levels associated with those gateways and the aggregate interference that may arise from 5G use of the 28 gigahertz band on the spacecraft itself. So I think we believe that there is a framework in place for a good outcome. There's still a lot of work to be done. Overall, we think the outcome is good and consistent with our plans. Andrew DeGasperi - Macquarie Capital (USA), Inc.: Great. And if you could just remind us what the backlog is currently on your commercial aircraft. I've seen that…

Operator

Operator

And our next question comes from the line of Mike Crawford from B. Riley. Your line is now open. Mike Crawford - B. Riley & Co. LLC: Thank you. Can you give an update on the status of your JVs that you're forming with Eutelsat? Mark D. Dankberg - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Okay. Yeah. I think last – was it last – week before, they had their earnings conference call and that was one of the topics there, and I think our view of it is just like theirs, that we've got good top level agreement between us. There's a pretty fair amount of detail to go through to reach closure on the agreements. We don't see anything that's jumping out as threatening that, but there is work to do. I think they said, and we've kind of agreed, that probably this year is a reasonable target for completing it. Also, one thing I would like to point out, which is good in the meantime, is that we're cooperating with them on helping to think about the KA-SAT services. And one point we mentioned is that we now have our first joint European aircraft on KA-SAT, with EL AL. So that's exciting, and I think it's good progress. Mike Crawford - B. Riley & Co. LLC: Just one more question in that regard is that, Eutelsat sold its majority stake in this maritime service provider. So, does that mean that you will be able to service the maritime market with Eutelsat with one of the JVs? Mark D. Dankberg - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: So the mobility services is definitely one of the targets in the JV. So that would be through KA-SAT and through the next-generation satellite. And I think we're a really good mobility partner.…

Operator

Operator

And our next question comes from the line of ... Mark D. Dankberg - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Okay, one more.

Operator

Operator

And our next question comes from the line of Andrew Spinola from Wells Fargo. Your line is now open.

Andrew C. Spinola - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

Thanks. Mark. I wanted to ask you about, on slide 10, and I'm looking at the coverage maps of ViaSat-1 versus your competitors. The one thing that's clear to me is that you've obviously concentrated your capacity with ViaSat-1 over the United States while your competitors have opted for a lot more coverage. And I'm wondering, as you opt for a lot more coverage with ViaSat-2 and ViaSat-3 why won't you suffer the same or similar productivity declines that your competitors have with the existing satellites or will you? Mark D. Dankberg - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yep, so that's a really good question. So there is really two factors. One is the total illuminated gigahertz that we will have with our satellite is much, much larger than the total illuminated gigahertz for those other ones. So if you look, if you go through and do some research you will see that the total illuminated gigahertz with those three others ranges from 5 gigahertz or 6 gigahertz to maybe 10 gigahertz or 12 gigahertz. ViaSat-1 was 100 and ViaSat-2 is quite a bit more than that and ViaSat-3 is a way more than that. So one is the illuminated gigahertz and that's really the factor that we have focused on and by illuminated gigahertz what I mean is take the bandwidth per beam, multiply that by the number of beams and you will get a total – it called total illuminated gigahertz. So number one is that's a really important metric of total productivity over the entire footprint. But the other really big factor is the one that Mike Crawford was sort of bringing up, which is this flexibility. And so, one thing that would be nice with the satellite and this is what we do with ViaSat-2 is you could say, hey, well the U.S. market, in fact, Wi-Fi is way bigger than all the rest of those coverage areas, how that if we move all of those illuminated gigahertz into the U.S. market. That would be really good if that's where the demand is and none of those other satellites have the ability to do that. That's a really important thing that we are doing on ViaSat-2 where we have a very big footprint. We cover Latin America down to South America, we cover the Atlantic Ocean, we cover the Caribbean, but if we wanted to we could bring all that bandwidth back into the U.S. So that doesn't increase the illuminated gigahertz, but it makes it a lot more useful when different market develop at different rates. So we think those are the two really big advantages that we have.

Andrew C. Spinola - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

Got it. And I just wanted to ask one quick follow-up. You mentioned the maritime market is something that might be interesting to you longer-term and it's kind of a unique market given the predominance of L-Band and the strength of one competitor. And I'm just wondering, it seems like that ViaSat sort of likes to target areas that can be disruptive and have markets that have characteristics that would lend themselves towards being disrupted. And just wondering if you have a similar thought process about the maritime market and if that's one of the reasons why you think that's an opportunity. Mark D. Dankberg - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yep, exactly. So the thing that's really interesting about the maritime market now is lots and lots of ships, tens of thousands of ships in total, but not very much bandwidth is used. All right. So the bandwidth per ship is not that high. And essentially what a lot of those ships are paying for is the ability to be connected if they need to be, but they're not really using a lot of bandwidth because there's not a lot of bandwidth to be had. At the other extreme of the market, there is a small number of ships with very, very large bandwidth demands, and for those, it doesn't mean that they'd have to cancel their L-Band subscription, they could still use that for safety and emergency communications but they have very high bandwidth needs, because they have a lot of passengers or they have a big crew or they have an exploration mission that requires collection of enormous amounts of data. So those are the ends of the market that we're going after, a small number of ships with very large bandwidth requirements because that's where we think most of the money is and that's what we're going to target.

Andrew C. Spinola - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

Got it. Thank you. Mark D. Dankberg - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Okay. So I think that cover – my voice is gone – that covers a lot of the questions. So I think that will be it for this afternoon. Thanks a lot, everybody, for joining our call. Look forward to talking to you next quarter.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today's conference. This concludes today's program. You may all disconnect. Everyone have a wonderful day.