Iridium Communications Inc Q1 2021 Earnings Call Transcript

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

Question: Michael Louie DiPalma - William Blair & Company L.L.C., Research Division - Analyst : Matt, on the subject you just mentioned of satellite phone cannibalization from IoT, how does that impact your view of the long-term satellite phone growth rate? And with your government EMSS contract and satellite phone growth becoming more mature and your faster growth with broadband and IoT, is that enough to carry growth for the entire company? Matthew Desch;CEO Well, I don't think we're being inconsistent with what we've ever talked about. We've never felt that sort of satellite phones were the future of this company. It was always held up remarkably well. Competition sort of fallen away in a lot of ways. And so despite what I call cannibalization, I would say, it was cannibalization of growth in that area. But it's maintained sort of a stable sort of base and maybe even has potential for small growth as there will be new products coming, and we have some planned in that area. And of course, we continue to see sort of strong performance in PTT. All those things sort of lead us to believe that this could be certainly a stable source, if not slow growth. And so it's more of a -- always been sort of a platform, high margin, strong cash flow producing margin. It's been more about protecting and ensuring state or base, while we grew in broadband, grew in IoT. We've obviously grown in hosted payload. We have a lot of enthusiasm about mid-band sort of services, which will drive potentially sort of voice and data IoT revenue lines, but still see good growth in the U.S. government. So -- and there's these unique additional services, things like STL and other things, which will -- which we believe will continue to drive growth. So we have plenty of growth vectors in the company. I'm always more concerned that, that didn't become in any way a tailwind in some ways. And it doesn't look like it is or will be.