Globalstar, Inc. (AMEX:GSAT) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Michael Crawford: I’m not sure if this is going to be for Kyle or you, Jay, but on your last call, it seems that you went into more detail on specific engineering NRE and licensing opportunities for Band 53 including one deal that was signed and expected to generate $30 million of NRE over like maybe an 18-month period. I’m wondering if that time frame has changed. And this said, there was another replicable deal related to private LTE for critical infrastructure that was near being signed than others in the works. But could you just maybe fill in the blanks on those issues?

James Monroe: Sure, I can. And Kyle chime in as well. But Mike, the ones that we talked about last quarter are the ones I was referring to a moment ago when I said that they are in the final throes of the technical work that needs to be done. We had hoped, of course, that it would have been done in 90 days, but it looks like it’s just going to take a little bit longer. That applies to both the project that you referred to that had the $30 million of NRE associated with it and the other critical infrastructure project that we talked about. Both are I mean, we look at them every single day, as you might imagine and work them every single day. But it is one of these deals where the technical work is just taking a little bit longer than we wanted and hope to have an announcement on one or both of those that we won’t have to wait another 90 days to announce.

Kyle Pickens: Yes. I think that’s most of it. The other thing to think about, Mike, I mean, these are very, very long-term deals. And so it’s very important that we get them exactly right going into them because once we deploy these. They’re in place for 15 to 30 years.

James Monroe: Mike, one other thing that I’ll add to Kyle’s point, that we’re talking about these 2 because they’re close and the engineering has proceeded well, and we feel like we can push those through quickly. But we do have as I mentioned in my short prepared remarks, a lot of additional discussions that are ongoing, either through the Qualcomm service integrator channel as well as with a ton of other individual companies that are testing or starting to test the band. And in part, they’re doing that because the ecosystem for both the infrastructure, which is the Qualcomm component of it as well as the chipset, which is another piece of Qualcomm, which has proliferated now into basically any device that Qualcomm sells. So it will be available, and that broadens the interest on the part of the users of these private network implementation.

So we are extremely bullish on what the future looks like. We’re looking at distribution centers where people are testing. We’re looking at other types of infrastructure, particularly critical infrastructure, which benefits from having totally licensed spectrum and all of those opportunities are maturing. But I think it’s safe to say that now that the ecosystem on the infrastructure side as well as on the handset side has evolved so rapidly that it’s a whole lot easier to entertain these conversations with companies that want to have them now.

Michael Crawford: Okay. And then just a final question is, given that you now have wholesale partner revenue, a large component of which I believe is fixed and some variable, what would have to happen for Globalstar to only recognize $86 million of revenue in the second half of the year to hit the raised lower end of your guidance?