Iridium Communications Inc Q1 2022 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 : With your announcement about launching spares, I know you just touched upon this, is there any change to your forecast for the expected useful life of the constellation? Is the time frame for replacing it still like around 2035? Matthew Desch Well, we've always said -- all we've really described as a CapEx holiday of at least 10 years, and that continues to support that. I would -- obviously, we're doing it because it will lengthen whatever the long-term life of our network is. We're not calling out a different amount of time at this time because you just never know what you don't know down the road. But obviously, every year that goes by will give us increasing confidence that we'll have a longer term. So there are, I know, accounting implications and other things, and I'm sure that, that's all part of, but we're not changing any of that right now. It's not appropriate to.

Question: Michael Louie DiPalma - William Blair & Company L.L.C., Research Division - Analyst : Great. and I may have missed this, but can you discuss the potential applications for your video compression partnerships with N2R and Videosoft that you announced last month? Do you see like adoption of that technology more so for the military market? Or is there an emphasis on like commercial end markets? Matthew Desch I think it's both. We've definitely seen some very good interest in -- in fact, the initial applications were sort of remote video over low in very remote places. And we saw it first in operation, and were kind of blowing away ourselves by how well it worked in our Arctic Lynx demonstration that we REFINITIV STREETEVENTS | www.refinitiv.com | Contact Us consent of Refinitiv. 'Refinitiv' and the Refinitiv logo are registered trademarks of Refinitiv and its affiliated companies. APRIL 19, 2022 / 12:30PM, IRDM.OQ - Q1 2022 Iridium Communications Inc Earnings Call did last summer, sort of a big demonstration area in the polar regions with a very broad range of DoD and other governments and that sort of thing, watching how well it worked. And so that really encouraged us to support those partners because we've also heard a number of our commercial partners, have also expressed interest in what they could do using the technology over very low data rates. And our network isn't about speed. We're not trying to provide tens or hundreds of megabits like others. And in fact, some other networks are better for those kind of applications, if you're doing those all the time. But our network is extremely well suited for certain applications and being able to do good video over our kind of like a Certus 100 device, we think is really unique. There's just nobody who's going to be able to do that. So yes, a number of our commercial partners are also looking at it as well. But I can't really announce or describe exactly all the applications that I've heard it possibly being used for.