Iridium Communications Inc Q4 2020 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 : And Matt, I wanted to say that was a funny joke about the geostationary satellite and the delay. Matthew Desch;CEO You got that. You got that. Did you, Louie?

Question: Michael Louie DiPalma - William Blair & Company L.L.C., Research Division - Analyst : Sounds good. And for the current handhelds, whether it's with Garmin or others, they're noted for the ability to send text messages everywhere. Are you saying that future iterations with the new transceivers will also have multimedia capabilities such that you could be in the middle of nowhere. And now you can send like a selfie? Is that going to be possible with the new technology? Matthew Desch;CEO It's a little depressing, if that's the only thing you're going to do in the middle of nowhere. But yes, absolutely. I mean it is a multimedia device. It's very efficient for sending pictures, certainly sending much richer text streams, you could imagine today where you do text, but doing outlook makes a lot more sense or real e-mail with information embedded in the email, including attachments and that sort of thing. Those are all things that can be done from a much smaller, more portable device and done quite efficiently. And we do see those in the development, a number of things around that front. You will see different both from ourselves and our partners that exploit these new devices. And also, we're going to be working increasingly externally with partners. I think this is still unique about Iridium. It has been our kind of long-standing strategy to license our technology and to work with our partners around products that fit them perfectly because we know when we embed Iridium technology into our partners' businesses, it makes it easier for them to exploit and expand and use that service. So we have some other of those in the works. We'll announce those when the time comes, but I'm quite excited about the potential for embedding our capabilities into deeper and deeper into sort of the consumer value chain.