Iridium Communications Inc. (NASDAQ:IRDM) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Matt Desch: Well, I think, as I mentioned in our results, Project Stardust is an incremental investment that we weren’t expecting to make last year, assuming that a proprietary solution with Qualcomm was adopted in the market. But people decided they didn’t want to buy Qualcomm’s new chips and so — and preferred a standardized solution, and that isn’t available. We would like to continue developing all these new products and services that we mentioned. I mentioned we’re quite excited about; we didn’t talk a whole lot about it, but building a maritime service terminal that has all the regulatory capabilities into it even further solidify our position as a companion product. It will have GMDSS, LRIT, SSAS, Citadel services, all in a single terminal, which would make it by far the most popular companion product in the marketplace for any kind of VSAT terminal.

That’s not something I want to slow down in any way, so that we can just absorb with the same amount of R&D a new investment in Project Stardust. Nor do we want to slow down the development on our new IoT transceiver that we’ve been sort of building for a while and for which our partners are quite excited about. So I wouldn’t say it’s anything to do with competition, only a new opportunity to move into standards based narrowband IoT that we decided to do kind of mid-year, late last year in 2023. And that’s sort of adding, if you will, some shorter-term pressure on R&D and CapEx.

Operator: This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to management for any closing remarks.

Matt Desch: Well, thanks. We do have a busy conference schedule I know in the first quarter, so I’m sure we’ll be seeing some of you in those places, and we look forward to visiting with many of you over the next coming weeks. So we’ll see you also for the first quarter in a couple of weeks. Thanks. Take care.

Operator: The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.