Telesat Corporation (NASDAQ:TSAT) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Andrew Browne: A rigorous process that we’ve gone through.

Arun Seshadri: Got it. Understood. Thank you. And then separately, can you talk about broadcast revenue? It seems like even adjusting for the run rate, Bell and maybe a little bit for the EchoStar, your broadcast revenue is still a little bit lower than we would have expected if you could give any additional color there. And then also how much in GEO OpEx reductions are embedded in your EBITDA guidance. Thank you.

Daniel Goldberg: I’ll let Andrew take the second one. I’ll start with the first one. So, yes, I mean, and I said in my opening remarks, the expected decline in video overwhelmingly driven by one thing that’s already happened, which was the renewal that we secured with Bell for Nimiq 4. Yep. Sorry, just keeping my Nimiq straight with Nimiq 4 last October. So we had nearly three months of the impact of that lower rate last year, but we got the full run rate impact of it for this year. And we set at the time. I know, it was a significantly lower rate that we agreed with Bell to close that Nimiq 4 renewal. So that’s the biggest contributor to the expected decline in broadcast this year. And then, you know, there’s Echo. So we just started conversations with Echo.

Our guidance accommodates, you know, a range of different outcomes with where we end up with them from, you know, they don’t renew anything to – they renew just part of it or they renew all of it. But no matter what our expectation is, given what’s going on in the market, given the other recent renewals we got. We are expecting under any scenario, it’s going to be materially less revenue from DISH on Nimiq 5 than what we’ve been recognizing over the past 15 years. So anyway, and then, you know, there are other broadcast customers we have that we sort of take into account when we put our projections together. But fundamentally, it’s the two that I’ve highlighted.

Arun Seshadri: Got it helpful. Last thing for me is how much do you plan on spending, you know, I guess, on Lightspeed before getting definitive docs from, I guess, the Canadian government on the funding? And when do you – and when you think about the OpEx side, you kind of mentioned on EBITDA for 2025, the step down would be less than 2024. Any way you could quantify the OpEx, you know, within that – within ’25 that you can expect, you know, today? Thanks. That’s all from me.

Andrew Browne: I’ll address some components of your questions indeed. I think your first question was relating to the step down in our GEO OpEx. And as you probably appreciate, our fixed costs are approximately, you know, 62%, 65%. And nonetheless, we’ve gone through in great detail looking at our plans or scale of plans and gone through the investment in Lightspeed there in the future. But then – so we’ve brought our GEO costs down now approximately, I’d say 4% or so, notwithstanding the fact that our costs are pretty well fixed. And then when you look at Lightspeed, that indeed about 65% to 70% of that increase is indeed fixed. And primarily it’s coming from compensation as we scale up and we hire people coming in. And then, you know, just coming back to our sort of guidance and adjusted EBITDA $340 million to $360 million.

But just to compare, if you take a look at what we said is $90 million – $80 million $90 million for Lightspeed. If you actually added that back to what adjusted EBITDA guidance is, we come to a margin of like 79% to 80%. So our costs are very, very focused. And after 2025, we probably maybe, you know, as Dan had said, I think our expectations in terms of, you know, top line will not see the reductions that we’re seeing now. And in OpEx, we probably wouldn’t give any guidance right now specifically for 2025. So I hope that’s kind of addressed your – you know, the variation of your questions.

Arun Seshadri: Yes. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. And the next question is from Mr. Walter Piecyk from LightShed. Please go ahead.

Unidentified Analyst: Yes. Hi, everybody. This is Joe for Walt. You provided a CapEx range. I just want to kind of get a sense of what’s the difference between hitting the high end versus coming in that $1 billion low end of the range. Is there something like, what’s the limiting factor right now?

Daniel Goldberg: Well, I mean, our suppliers need to hit milestones in order to get money from us. So, you know, we’ve got a nominal schedule that they need to achieve, but if they don’t hit their milestone, we aren’t going to pay them. So, you know, we’ve built the range principally around that.

Unidentified Analyst: Okay. And then getting back to, I think it was Chris’ question about enterprise, if you could – if you drill down a little further into that, just so I understand, were these customer contracts that were up for renewal, and they required having LEO as part of the solution going forward? So there’s going to be a non-renewal. So how does that work with the kind of guide comes down that much?

Daniel Goldberg: Yes, that’s exactly it, Joe. I mean, we had contracts coming up for renewal. I said in my opening remarks that a big chunk of it, the biggest contributor was around maritime. It was cruise. We’ve got customers that have been serving the cruise market, and they lost business to Starlink. And so they didn’t renew their contracts with us. That’s how it works. That’s what it was. That’s exactly what it was. And that accounts for, again, that was the biggest contributor.

Unidentified Analyst: Okay. And then are those – how long are those contracts generally? Like, is there a chance, or let’s say the next renewal, whenever that is one in 2027 or 2026 or whatever, when you have something that’s potentially on the horizon to be commercial with Lightspeed that you could win that business back?