Iridium Communications Inc at William Blair Growth Stock Conference Transcript

The following is excerpted from the question-and-answer section of the transcript.

Question: Louie DiPalma - William Blair & Company, L.L.C. - Analyst : Excellent. And Matt, you -- last year at this conference, we're teasing this transformational partnership with Qualcomm. And you've disclosed that internally, you refer to it as project TNT. And you actually delivered upon this partnership. But the question that many investors have is, why do Qualcomm choose you? There's a lot of satellite operators out there. There's SpaceX, Viasat, Inmarsat, Intelsat. I guess, [the sats] --?

Question: Louie DiPalma - William Blair & Company, L.L.C. - Analyst : Yeah. My follow up is, you referenced the iPhone 14 with Apple and they are partnering with Global Star. And how is what you're providing with Qualcomm different from the Apple Global Star service? REFINITIV STREETEVENTS | www.refinitiv.com | Contact Us consent of Refinitiv. 'Refinitiv' and the Refinitiv logo are registered trademarks of Refinitiv and its affiliated companies. JUNE 07, 2023 / 8:40PM, IRDM.OQ - Iridium Communications Inc at William Blair Growth Stock Conference

Question: Louie DiPalma - William Blair & Company, L.L.C. - Analyst : Yeah. And taking on what you just said in that, Starlink and AST Space Mobile are two of several that are pursuing this, like smartphone connectivity, direct-to-device capability, like using like cellular spectrum. And do you see the potential that the service provided by those? Like, cellular spectrum offerings could surpass what Iridium will be able to do or what Global Star will be able to do? Like. will those be able to do voice calls over satellite with a smartphone? Will they be able to do multimedia messaging? What needs to happen to get those services there?

Question: Louie DiPalma - William Blair & Company, L.L.C. - Analyst : Right. And when you say that like SpaceX access or somebody else's services is years away, is your Qualcomm service still months away?

Question: Louie DiPalma - William Blair & Company, L.L.C. - Analyst : Yeah. The rest of your businesses generates $300 million in free cash flow. And we will talk about that also in a few minutes. But for this Qualcomm partnership project TNT, one of the reasons that investors are so excited is because it has the ability to bring Iridium devices to every cellphone's store all across the world, in theory. And that Android is ubiquitous, and Qualcomm is ubiquitous in the Android platform. And can you just provide any high-level numbers in terms of like estimating the TAM, in terms of how prevalent Qualcomm's Snapdragon platform is? And how many devices Iridium could be embedded in? REFINITIV STREETEVENTS | www.refinitiv.com | Contact Us consent of Refinitiv. 'Refinitiv' and the Refinitiv logo are registered trademarks of Refinitiv and its affiliated companies. JUNE 07, 2023 / 8:40PM, IRDM.OQ - Iridium Communications Inc at William Blair Growth Stock Conference

Question: Louie DiPalma - William Blair & Company, L.L.C. - Analyst : Yes, no. Yeah. Investors, nonetheless, they're going to keep on badger.

Question: Louie DiPalma - William Blair & Company, L.L.C. - Analyst : So for the rest of the business, which is doing very well, and that you raised your guidance last quarter and you raised the long-term outlook, I believe, for your commercial voice and data division that has your traditional satellite phones. What are the key drivers in terms of the improved outlook for the commercial voice in data division?

Question: Louie DiPalma - William Blair & Company, L.L.C. - Analyst : Yeah. And in that segment, you mentioned that Push-To-Talk fairly new devices, I believe those are with Icom. But you also recently announced the Iridium GO! exec, which is an exciting new mobile hotspot. And what has been the initial traction of that? And can you discuss like other new products that you've already announced?

Question: Louie DiPalma - William Blair & Company, L.L.C. - Analyst : And you can use that mobile hotspot and in aircraft, right? But in addition, there recently has been news from your partner network about, I think, Collins Aerospace has an Iridium terminal that I think is on a Bombardier Global 5000 aircraft. And I know that you've been working for a while on a new terminals that go on commercial airplanes and business jets. Can you provide update there?

Question: Louie DiPalma - William Blair & Company, L.L.C. - Analyst : Great. And switching to the IoT segment that in your slide deck you said, over the past several years, has been one of the main sources of growth for the company. This is somewhat of a technical question. And it also ties back to the Qualcomm partnership that we just discussed. But you have these Garmin inReach devices. And you had one of them shown on the slide. They have a pretty fairly large antenna for a handheld device. And many investors have asked, if you're going to be able to provide Iridium connectivity on a smartphone then what is the need go out and buy a $300 Garmin device? And is there going to be cannibalization there? So along those lines, a smartphone like this -- iPhone doesn't have this big antenna whereas the Garmin device does. So what is the purpose of the antenna? And is the performance of your Garmin devices or your partners, Garmin device, is still going to be like superior to the performance of smartphone connectivity and --?

Question: Louie DiPalma - William Blair & Company, L.L.C. - Analyst : Excellent. Thanks, Matt. And that concludes the webcast portion of the presentation. And we are going to resume the conversation in the Meyer Room on the second floor. So thank you very much.