Terran Orbital Corporation (NYSE:LLAP) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Scott Buck: Hi. Good morning, everybody. Thanks for taking my questions. First of all, I was hoping you could give us a little bit of color on why you’re so confident in being able to monetize that $180 million from Rivada in the second half of the year? I know there’s some investor hesitation around the contract. So just how do you kind of de-risk that over time?

Marc Bell: Yes. That’s why we brought it up at the very beginning of the call. We are extremely confident we’re going to PDR. We have world-class engineers for design services. That’s the bulk of what we’re doing with PDR and then we’re also focusing on long lead items. So we are very confident in our ability to deliver the PDR on time and on time, which will trigger the payment. So we are very confident in our abilities as we’ve done many, many PDRs over the past decade. So we have tons of experience doing this.

Scott Buck: Marc, I guess I’m more asking about their ability to execute their end of the contract. I mean what due diligence have you done on Rivada at this point that makes you feel comfortable that they are capable of making a payment like that?

Marc Bell: We’ve done extreme due diligence on their financials, both with ourselves and our attorneys. We feel confident of whether — we can’t disclose what we have — information we know, but we are very much aware of who their funding is and how much it’s for and where it’s coming from. So Rivada has asked that any questions about their funding be directed to them, but we can tell you that we are confident about their ability to fund.

Scott Buck: Okay. I appreciate that and second one you mentioned —

Marc Bell: Let me add one more to this, Scott, I don’t mean to interrupt. So one thing that has — was the ITU vote, I don’t want to play down with a very, very big hurdle because now their spectrum that they have is all valid. And as you know, spectrum is worth a lot of money. And so once they got into early July, that ITU vote was incredibly significant for Rivada because that made their spectrum money good. And SpaceX has also been a big supporter of them. As Peter Thiel, one of the original investors in SpaceX is also one of the original investors in Rivada. And so SpaceX has also been very supportive of the Rivada program with the ITU.

Scott Buck: Great. I appreciate that added color. And my second question, you mentioned previously that you have the capacity or you will have the capacity to handle multiple contracts of this size, I’m just curious, where do you see the market today? How many of those opportunities are actually out there over the next three to five years?

Marc Bell: Michael — Congressman Michael Waltz said about two months ago when he was — they had a committee hearing with Saltzman, who runs Space Force testifying and he let the cat out of the bag. He said that the STC, which is the US entities for licensing has applications for 60,000 satellites and that’s just for the US. So globally, the number has got to be staggering with the ITU. I mean every country we talk to is trying to build their own constellation. Every military is trying to build their own transfer layer. Everybody is trying to do their own ISR for imaging surveillance and reconnaissance. I mean we — just like I said at the end of my presentation before I mean we are just being inundated with tons of opportunities from around the globe.