Globalstar, Inc. (GSAT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Presentation]

Good morning. Thank you all for joining us. I'm Jason Bernstein, Strategic Adviser for Investor Relations. It's great to see a lot of familiar faces here and a lot of new faces. We have a jam-packed day in store, along with a few surprises before we begin. Please note that today's call contains forward-looking statements, intended to fall within the safe harbor provided under securities laws. Factors that could cause results to differ materially are described in risk factors on our SEC filings, including its annual report on Form 10-K for the year ending 2023. Also note, management may reference EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA in the presentation, which are financial measures not recognized under U.S. GAAP. We have a great lineup of executives and guests joining us today. Today's presentation, you have a QR code. If you haven't scanned it, it's available on our website right now. We have about 3 hours today. So let's get started. If you don't know who our first speaker is, you're in the wrong room. Please welcome Globalstar's CEO, Paul Jacobs.

All right. Good morning, everybody, and great to have you here. It's been just over a year since the deal with XCOM Labs brought me and some of the other executives to Globalstar. And obviously, a lot has happened in that time. And I have to say that the opportunities that we saw when we did the deal, have really been validated and that we see a lot more opportunities going into the future. We're super happy to have you at NASDAQ today. We're planning on uplifting our shares here early next year. And we see that uplift and the associated reverse split as a way to emphasize that Globalstar has a multibillion-dollar market cap. So we aren't a penny stock even though the share price is low. We want to open up the shares to a broader range of investors, some of which are constrained by that share price. We want to attract an increasing number of analysts to cover the stock. And we want to do all of that in the service of building a great base of investors in the company. So just short -- in short, the mission of Globalstar is to ensure mission-critical connectivity. If you're in space, on earth, Globalstar is there to provide the connectivity when it matters most. And we're really proud of being able to do that, saving lives and being in the middle of many, many important things. Over the last month or so, we've really been upping the communications. We've brought out a number of announcements. And we're trying to build some momentum there, and we're executing on the initiatives that we have. Today, we're really excited to have you here because we'll get to dive a bit deeper into some of these announcements and give you a little bit more background, give you some more insights on them. Also, we're going to show you some actual demos of real products and some of the things that we've been developing, and we're super excited to have here to show you. We had a lot of fun setting stuff up, team in the back of the room, thank you guys for being here. I know you put a lot of work into it. We're also here to introduce you to some of our partners and customers and also to talk about strategies that we're pursuing and where we think we're going to find opportunities in the future. So Globalstar as a company has been around more than 30 years since its original founding as a joint venture between Qualcomm and Loral and a few of us from XCOM Labs were involved in its early days. I was digging through some old material box, and I found a slide deck from '96 where our CTO, Matt Grob, was pitching Globalstar to put packet data support using Internet protocols. This was like we had actually convinced people to do that back then, had a picture of the board and said, resistance is futile. Anyways, and his wife actually was a chip lead on it. So we have like all this old memorabilia from those very early days, kind of cool. Obviously, this is not a patent licensing business like I ran at Qualcomm or one of the portions of Qualcomm. But we do have a significant portfolio, a lot of experience in making sure that we patent the things that we invent and just for the ability to have some protection or trading cards or however it works out. But we do have a portfolio and we make sure that we manage that well. It's a relatively small company, 340-ish people. We are going to grow that number as we transition the XCOM labs, people, the employees fully in the Globalstar next year. And also as we ramp up to support the new constellation and ground network. We have a lot of business areas that we're working on. but they're united like they might say, oh, what do these have to do with each other. They all are based off of the spectrum asset that we have and that we show at the center of the circle. So each of these businesses has its own dynamics. It's in a different stage of development. Two of the businesses are terrestrial-based businesses using the n53 terrestrial authorization we have -- but we can also, in the case of XCOM RAN, we can run that over other spectrum allocations like CBRS or mobile network operator spectrum. So it's not constrained n53, but that is a big competitive differentiator for us. And alternatively, also we can license the n53 spectrum to other equipment providers and to operators who participate in the ecosystem with us. 4 of the business areas are based off the use of the satellite constellation. Obviously, the very high profile one is our wholesale consumer business. Some are very nascent like the government space business, and you'll hear about this a little bit more later today, but we're very excited about this area. It really hasn't been a big focus of Globalstar in the past. And this goes back to the very early days where Globalstar, decades ago, sort of lost the government business to Iridium and never really got back to it. Now, we are getting back to it with a great partner. And I'll have a fireside chat with our partner. We have legacy businesses, such as the consumer retail business, which has been around since the very earliest days. I remember the phone that we created with the antenna that came out, people claimed it looked like a machine gun that was probably not too good. But, in any case, that was the original business, and we continue to sell consumer stand-alone satellite messaging devices. And we see it as a business that's going to be increasingly impacted by the integration into smartphones. I mean, I did my career at Qualcomm integrating functionality into smartphones, and you saw how that affected the sort of stand-alone business. But they're always ends up being some niche component of that business. We see there is a window in which there's still an opportunity there. But we are investing according to the size of the opportunity that we see going forward. Some of the other businesses, they're long-standing, but in transition, the commercial IoT business. We have new technology, which we're in alpha stage of testing. We'll go to beta in the first quarter of next year. And that's going to give us 2-way capabilities that we haven't previously had. So exciting to have some new technology coming as well. The company is a global company. The spectrum assets are not a patchwork of assets as some people have, this is a single allocation around the world. So the same spectrum everywhere. And with the recent addition of Mexico, we have terrestrial authorizations that cover the major countries of North America. And you can see on this map, the countries where we have the terrestrial authorizations are shown in orange. So it's not everywhere in the world, but clearly significant markets. The gateways are also shown on this in blue, the gateways cover the world. So that's where the satellites connect to. And then there's a resilient ground network which connects those to the rest of the network of the world. And the other thing is that because we're mission critical, that means that Globalstar never sleeps on the job. So we have satellite operation centers around the world, and they're ready to react to whatever surprises we get in space because space, many things can happen. So you have to be ready wherever and whenever something might go on. We also have development offices around the world as well. And that allows us to do essentially around the clock, not just development, but system integration and test. And that's a huge benefit to speed up the pace of development that a developer in one country can work and another country can test and then the information gets back to the developers again when they wake up and come in the next morning, and that works extremely well. We used that in the past -- in our past lives. And it's a great thing to have and we have it here. And with the XCOM Labs deal, Globalstar gained an office in Bangalore, India, with a really excellent team. They do a system test and development there. And we also, of course, have the San Diego office where we have access to some very highly skilled wireless engineers and other disciplines. So the assets we have are fantastic. They're a platform for innovation. We have a really great foundation which it's -- our partners have joined to generate growth for themselves and innovation with us because of these assets that we have. And we have this great financial strength now because of the large investments and ongoing revenues from the wholesale business. We have world-class technical talent. We have this ability to easily add new services and capabilities to our bent pipe satellite constellation. As I said earlier, we have a global dedicated spectrum position. We have operational expertise, which we've developed over decades. We have cost-effective user devices. One big benefit compared to a lot of the competition is that incremental revenues require minimal capital expense since the constellations are paid largely by the wholesale business. And we're commercially providing service to consumers and commercial customers while some of the others in the industry are still testing technology. They're still searching for business models to support massive investments. They're attempting to secure spectrum, they're attempting to find go-to-market partners. So we are really in a very strong position to lever what we've built to date and go from there. As I said, the center of the business model is a spectrum position, sort of ties together all the efforts that we're pursuing, the FCC recently reauthorized our licenses and reaffirmed the exclusive use of the bands. In addition, as I said, we continue to expand our terrestrial rights and we're very proud that in the reauthorization, the FCC really recognize the fact that our systems are providing life-saving services. And that, as I said, that's something that's highly motivating to all of us. Other satellite companies are out there trying to obtain small bits of spectrum like 5 or 10 megahertz, which they have to secure in each location where the wireless licenses have been authorized. And these things might be relatively -- if you think about how wireless licenses are done, they are done, in some cases, on relatively small regions. And given the size of a satellite beam, even the focus beams that people are talking about now, they're still quite large areas. And so even if you have a location cleared for satellite use, those beams can still overlap other places where they're terrestrial networks. In contrast, we have 16.5 megahertz of S-band, almost 9 megahertz of L-band, 339 megahertz of C-band globally. And in addition to having the spectrum, the bent pipe architecture of the system allows for a lot of innovation. And it's because we can make changes to the technology on the ground as opposed to having to do it in the sky and without having to affect the satellites. And just to dive deeper a little bit into that, so what is bent pipe, what do we mean when we say bent pipe. It's that the signals that are sent up to the satellite, whether it's from the user device or from the gateway, they come back down. They are bounced back off the satellite back down to earth to the receiver on the other side on the ground It's a little bit more complicated than that. I mean there's antenna patterns, then there's -- we're on earth, the signals are coming from and going to. The frequencies are translated. There's some other details to it. But effectively, you can think that whatever goes up, whatever signal goes up, comes back down again. So all the processing that's done is done on the ground. And another benefit then is that we don't have to spend power on the satellite to do the processing because in the regime we're in, the throughput that you can get from the satellite to the ground is determined by the amount of power that you can put down on the ground. So you want to spend the power that you've collected in the satellite for transmission as much as possible, and that's -- that is what we do. The other thing, that's a massive benefit, is that we can simultaneously run multiple complex technologies and services on the satellite. If we had to demodulate, so if we had to do the processing in space, it require us to sort of continually reprogram the processors up there to do the different signal technologies. And that assumes that there's enough compute and memory on the satellite to even do that because that all adds cost and complexity of the satellites. You have a constrained computing environment in space. And so there's significant limitations on how many technologies you might be able to support on the system. Because we have the bent pipe architecture and because the computing is on the ground, we can throw whatever power and space we need to in the gateway at processing any number of technologies that are being bounced off the satellite and coming back down. And so the result is that we have many technologies that are running simultaneously and that is technologies that Globalstar has developed organically. And in other cases, it's technologies that partners have developed, and we just host on our spectrum and our constellation. And I should say that we're continuing to develop new technologies, we're testing continuously over the air, has no effect on the commercial operation of the network. And it was one of the things that actually was super exciting to me and to the technologists when we did the deal was this idea that we could have this platform to easily innovate and drive technology forward. So you'll see that as time goes on. And when you -- also, when you think about us having 15% of the capacity of the network, there are services that don't require a lot of throughput. They actually just require that there's some connectivity, ubiquitous connectivity globally and don't really take up very much of that 15% but are still extremely valuable. So while you're in your mental model of 15%, don't just think that that's the only way that we can generate value and generate revenues. We had -- in these areas, we've had a few updates recently, and we're going to dive into all of these things more deeply today. So you'll hear a lot more about kind of what we've been up to. If you look at the wholesale business, obviously, we understand this is of great interest, and we'll share what we can about that deal. What I wanted to say about that business though is that go-to-market is aligned with one of the biggest trends in technology, which is the cycle at which new innovation is integrated into smartphones. We've been supporting the wholesale consumer segment for a few years now. And the fact that it continues to grow is due to the fact that we are able to run the constellation with tremendous operational excellence, so very important. And the fact that we have this dedicated spectrum essentially around the globe, it's one chunk of spectrum that makes things much easier. And I would say the other big point I want to make is, unlike others in this direct to sell industry that are searching for a business model, our business model is extremely clear. So, for others, from a mobile network operator, for example, say they were going to get into the business, Satellite messaging may only be a cost center, not a place to generate a clear revenue opportunity. There was a GSMA study that was done -- by the way, it was done before satellite messaging became a mainstream service and indicated that 40% of consumers would pay nothing extra for satellite connectivity and another 30% would pay less than 5%. And that was done before it became mainstream to have connectivity. So we don't know whether that was for safety and security. I have my doubts whether it was for streaming Netflix in the mountains. And so it doesn't seem yet that access to broadband outside of cellular coverage is a clear large revenue space or source despite competitors out there raising money to build very expensive constellations. What is our business model? We benefit from the economics of the handset market. We've enabled a feature which creates differentiation and reasons for a consumer to upgrade their phone more quickly. And even a small reduction in that phone upgrade cycle time is worth a lot to handset manufacturers. So that's why you see this business start the way that it has started. We will talk to you more about the wholesale business and the updates that we have. You can see very interesting things. I just wanted to be clear also, we talk about the 15%. That's a 15% of the satellite constellation. Globalstar is retaining 100% of the revenues from the other segments. So it's that 15% and 85% is really focused on the satellite side. I just wanted to make that clear. Okay, another segment of the Band 53, that's the name given by the standards bodies 3GPP for the spectrum that Globalstar has allocated for terrestrial use. That spectrum, it's the same S-band spectrum that's used for the link from the satellites to the user devices on the ground. But because we control both the satellite use of this and the terrestrial use of this, we are able to manage coexistence between these services. So it's really important that we have the control over both sides, which, as I said earlier, the FCC reaffirmed. Band 53, as I said, it's available in the major countries of North America, Canada, the United States and Mexico as well as other countries around the world. And what's cool is there's a lot of ways that we can use this spectrum. So yes, we can use the chunk just by itself and use that for running data through, and we're going to show you that today, the throughput that you get just on the 11.5% that we have in U.S., for example, isn't a huge amount, and that's been a reason why people haven't necessarily built it into a lot of different devices, like mainstream devices, but when you combine it with our XCOM technology, which we'll show you today, you can see that you can get a lot of data through that. So that's one way to start out with the basic -- just the spectrum by itself. Another thing that's super cool is that we can now do carrier aggregation, which means run data over that spectrum and CBRS as an example. And CBRS spectrum is great because it's available for use but the military can come in and take it away or somebody with a license that's higher than yours can come in and take it away. And so when we're trying to be mission-critical, you want to know that something is there, some things always there. And the n53 spectrum running in combination is always there. That one doesn't go away. So that's another way of using the spectrum with other spectrum so we can get more throughput. And then there's one other thing that we're excited about for the future, which is using the n53 in combination with unlicensed band. So there is a technology called NRU, unlicensed band new radio for 5G. And there's gigahertz -- literally gigahertz of spectrum around the world in the unlicensed bands that we can use n53 as an anchor for. So now you can imagine the amount of throughput we can get through that spectrum is really, really large. So that's why we're excited about n53. There's a lot of ways that we can use this spectrum, and it's a great differentiator when we're going to sell the XCOM RAN technology as well. And so we go to market both with partners and solution providers but also running over the XCOM RAN technology. And we're really applying some lessons that we learned from the Qualcomm days about how to create an ecosystem. In order to drive the ecosystem harder, sometimes you have to build the components of it yourself. But we're also making sure that we're helping other manufacturers get up to speed and get their stuff running on n53 because we want to create a larger opportunity for us. Globalstar benefits, both when we sell our XCOM RAN technology, but also when we license the spectrum to other manufacturers with other infrastructure. So we -- it's a win-win for us in that fashion. This global n53 market can be quite large because as I said, we continue to get authorizations for the spectrum for the terrestrial network in addition to the satellite uses. So let's turn to the XCOM RAN technology because we see this as another growth opportunity for us. And we're in trials right now with a large global retailer for highly automated micro fulfillment centers, controlling hundreds of robots and large metal racks, they have multiple floors. There's a difficult 3-dimensional RF environment there, not to mention the robots are carrying stuff around that changes the RF environment dramatically. But in that kind of an environment, it's hard to create the handoff regions that you typically use for a cellular network, particularly if the people in the company are used to just deploying WiFi access points. Our XCOM RAN technology does not care about handoff regions. It's a very unique thing. The radios that are in the cluster together look like a super cell. The device is moving between them do not see handoffs. And therefore, you can just add another radio without having to do this massive amount of planning. So it really is like deploying WiFi except that every time you add a new radio, you get more capacity on the network. And so there's no special planning that's just very easy if the network needs to be upgraded, modified. This has been an issue with private cellular networks that it's very hard to change when your requirements change, and that's not a problem with us. And I want to say also, we built this commercial grade cellular infrastructure with a very small but mighty team. You may know software, you add a lot of people to a software team does not necessarily get better. It actually can get slower. You now have -- you don't really know, okay, who depends on who and we had to go through this back in Qualcomm to get our technology to work and our products to work and untangle a spaghetti of code. We didn't do that here. We started with a team that had a tremendous amount of expertise and to build this technology. And what that means also is that we're very cost-effective about our development. We can sustain it and be profitable with a much smaller portfolio of customers and other private network suppliers. In addition, we're supporting the -- our retail customer today on the CBRS spectrum, but also talking about this fact that we have this mission-critical n53 spectrum. And as I said earlier, we're going to show n53 running on XCOM RAN with commercial modules and with iPhones today. So another just kind of to talk about how we get to a real infrastructure business because supplying private network infrastructure has been a tough market. We've seen a number of the suppliers have financial problems. And so why are we investing in it? Why do we think we can win? It goes back to what I said. We're just more focused and we have a cost-effective strategy. Obviously, as I said, depends on having an engineering team with deep expertise. But the other thing that it -- the way that we're doing is we are not depending on sort of hoping that we chose the right feature set or what everybody else has been doing is just building all the features out, all at once. So a massive investment to build every single thing that's in the standard. And having been a person running a business that depended on the standard, in the past, we tried to create complexity in the standards because it was a competitive moat. What we're doing here is actually choosing the right feature set for what the customer wants. And so we work very closely with the initial customer to define the product market fit. So like on this slide, when we started out, we had a minimum viable product definition, we just define that ourselves. That was our way of getting in the door. It wasn't every feature as what we thought would be the right features. But then we found a partner and we codeveloped with that partner to create the feature set. And then we continue on to the next customer and the next customer. And in the end, you end up with the horizontal platform that has all the features. But in the meantime, you have product market fit with the customer and you are generating revenues from that customer and the set of customers as you go along. And so it's kind of this bootstrapping model, which is nothing new. I mean if you remember this book crossing the chasm, that was the idea of how you cross the chasm to get mainstream adoption, we're applying it to the private network business. And so it's just the right way to do it, and it really helps -- that allows us to have a much more focused development team, and we can be profitable with fewer customers as we grow. Obviously, the intent is to have a horizontal business going on. So I just want to close by saying the opportunities ahead are super exciting. We have a lot of areas that we're working on. Each one of those areas has a reason why we're excited about it. and we're going to talk to you about all of that stuff today. The addressable markets that we have are large, you can see the TAMs add up to very large numbers here. Each of the presenters today will go through and talk to you about their TAMs. And I'm just happy to be able to talk to you. We look forward to answering questions later on, and thank you again for being here today.

I'm Kyle Pickens. Most of you guys know me since I talked to all of you guys all the time. At Globalstar, I'm focused on the terrestrial spectrum resource. My title is VP of Strategy. And we've talked about this a lot in the past. But we're developing Band 53 into a very exciting asset for Globalstar. Band 53 offers fully licensed spectrum resource that customers can use across many borders. As you guys heard when [indiscernible] is talking about mining companies, multinational mining companies, imagine having a mine in Zimbabwe and one in South Africa, and you could have the same type of connectivity on both places. And then in between, you could have a satellite connection. So it's a -- as a Globalstar product, it's a very interesting solution. We have a mid-band resource, as you guys know spectrum, mid-band is the most valuable part. It allows us to have reasonable propagation, but also spectral reuse. So for enterprise use cases for private wireless, the ability to use it multiple times is very interesting. And then as Paul said, we have aggregation with both CBRS and the unlicensed bands. So we can use it as an anchor channel and then add the additional capacity through those different bands. Also, we have XCOM RAN which we can turbocharge the spectrum and get a lot more out of it than a 10 megahertz resource. I still think 10 megahertz is a good amount of spectrum, and we think it's very valuable obviously. Okay. So Band 53 , as I said, is a clean spectrum resource that is useful for both traditional wireless carriers, cable companies and enterprises. We still think that all of these people should be interested in the band. It is a very usable band, and then it's also very interesting for all of the private wireless use cases that we've talked about in the past. We're a big believer that automation is going to be a big thing going forward and having robust connectivity is going to be an important part of driving automation and the benefits that automation brings. So I had -- we're not specific at the very top of this, but I thought that was maybe a little bit too low key. We have been working on this for a very long time. There is a CTI study that says that it takes about 10 years to take a band from its infancy to being commercially available. It's taken us longer than we would have liked, than many of you guys would have liked, but we have made and met many, many milestones over the years. So we've gotten through FCC approval. Many people have tried it and didn't make it. We've standardized the band with 3GPP, including aggregation combos. We've gotten into chipsets with Qualcomm and others. We have radios available, and that continues to go up or increase. And then we have module vendors, which will talk about on our panel later, and we just announced 2 new module vendors today and Quectel and Telit. And then as you guys -- we've said many times, now we have control of the ecosystem and we're able to have XCOM RAN run Band n53. So one of the things that Paul and team had learned at Qualcomm is that sometimes you need to take control of the ecosystem and drive the ecosystem so that you can control your destiny and move things forward. And we have been driving the ecosystem for a while, but we are turbocharging that now. Okay. Also, Paul mentioned this earlier, but we are available now in 12 countries. It's 13.4 million square miles. It's a decent chunk of the entire world and a lot of important markets. We have all of the major countries in North America. I thought that it was all of North America until yesterday, evidently, the Caribbean and Central America count is North America. So you guys know that. We have roughly 1 billion POPs covered and 10 billion megahertz POPs with 40% of those being in the United States. So you guys have probably seen variations of this chart before. This comes from our friends at Goldman Sachs and RSA. The main point here is that spectrum is valuable. The range for license spectrum is -- tends to be somewhere between $0.50 and over $2 a megahertz POP. Everybody value spectrum on a dollar per megahertz spot basis. It's just an easy way to do it. So we're kind of sticking with that. According to Jonathan Chaplin at New Street, who many of you guys know, spectrum auctions in the United States approached $300 billion. In today's dollars, that would be $660 billion, and they estimate that the value of global spectrum is around $1.7 trillion based on those numbers. So it's obviously -- we don't have a TAM slide. We don't have TAM for terrestrial spectrum on the TAM slide, but it's a very, very big asset. We control 10 megahertz of it in the 12 countries and growing. So we're very excited about what we can do with it. So based on historical transactions, the U.S. spectrum alone, if we were to put a value of $0.50 to $2 a megahertz POP on it, it would be somewhere between $1 and $4 per share just for the U.S. spectrum. We're trading a little over $2 now. So obviously, that is a very big potential resource for us. Bands with complete ecosystems tend to trade for higher values. So we would hope that we would be able to reach towards the higher end of the range. And our goal is to generate cash flow from the band that justifies these types of numbers. We're not necessarily saying we're holding out for some big spectrum transaction with the carrier. We're saying that this is what we think the value is, and we are working to make sure that the business that we built around it justifies those values. International spectrum tends to trade at a discount. There's lots of ways to look at it. Do you do it based on GDP? Do you do it based on PPP? But generally, it trades at a discount. And so what we've said in the past is we think that it could be worth what the U.S. spectrum is worth. I think we still think that today. So we've got 11 other countries and growing, a decent amount of population, and we're looking to hopefully double what we think the spectrum value could be from the United States. So this is just -- in summary, it's natural resource, it's a perpetual resource. I always used to like calling it a nondepleting natural resource. So we can continue to make money from it and it doesn't go away. The demand for spectrum is growing. We love that we have the kind of backdrop of automation, driving private wireless. One of the things that we've done with XCOM RAN is find that Lighthouse customer that can help, as Paul was talking about the journey of innovation. We're getting into a large customer which will then allow us to continue to develop the ecosystem and drive further use cases. It's a very flexible band because we have it in different markets. Whatever we do in the United States, doesn't mean that we have to do the same thing in Canada necessarily. And then it's a recurring revenue model. So we're going to be leasing the spectrum and we'll be getting paid on a recurring basis, which tends to be valued highly by the market. And then lastly, because of the satellite network, we have no build-out requirements, which there's other spectrum holders with that build-out requirements, and we don't have to deal with that. Okay. Can we have the panels come up? While they're coming up, we only have 10 minutes for this panel, and there's 4 of us, so we're going to have to keep it pretty tight. I'll intro them while they're coming up. So Tamer, who some of you guys have met, joins me from the Globalstar team. Tamer is our VP of Terrestrial Networks and is driving the XCOM RAN business, but he's also an amazing resource overall. Tamer has a PhD in wireless communications. Before joining us, he was at Qualcomm and then he has also led the MulteFire Alliance. So when Paul was talking about NRU before, Tamer was really one of the early people driving that overall concept. So very, very lucky to have him on the team. And then also joining us from the outside are Deborah from Hawk Networks and Neset from Telit, I'm not using people's last names just because it's considerably easier than trying to pronounce, especially Neset's last name. Deborah is an entrepreneur and a CEO of Hawk Networks, an Althea, which she started in 2017. Her vision was to build a company that would deliver technology solutions for the emerging machine-to-machine economy. She's also done a lot of other interesting things, including raise Alpacas when the Alpaca market was hot. So if anybody wants to talk to her about that, that's worth talking about. And then Neset is the SVP at Telit -- Sorry, where he is responsible for driving sales of their modules in the Americas. Okay. Deborah, could you tell us a little bit more about Hawk Networks, what you're doing with it? And what customer opportunities you see for Band 53?

Yes. Happy to. Yes, I'm really honored to be here amongst these amazing innovators at this time. And really, it feels revolutionary. And that's really what we're trying to do at Hawk Networks is, we saw the opportunity and the change that was happening and how we do business, how we produce goods, as everything now becomes automated, data-driven. So nearly 10 years ago, we we're really looking at how machines communicate with each other and how they can pay each other's created price or a routing protocol and machine-to-machine payments and all kinds of exciting things on the telecom side. And really, we saw a theme along the way as customers in the EV space and enterprise and industry came to us with their connectivity challenges. And it really was how do we not only solve our connectivity problems right now, but what does that look like in the future? And I think that's what's so exciting about really the n53 spectrum and how that can fit as part of that the stack across many different sectors. But the need is really salient right now. we're talking to customers who have large factories that have connectivity challenges will go down, and they'll lose $1 million an hour in revenue. That's $1 million every hour their connectivity is down. So when we talk about messing critical, that's what it feels like to be.

Yes, that stat, I love it. Just think $1 million an hour across 12 countries. That's a lot. Let's get that. Can you talk any more about some of the pain points that your customers are seeing?

Yes. Speaking again about kind of the cost and the revenue side of things, we had one company in the auto manufacturing space. Looking at the ever-increasing need for data and data upload, and of course, that's going to put a lot of strain on their system. And -- so they actually anticipated about roughly $4 billion in costs over the next 10 years in public connectivity. And really, these pain points that they have touch along everything we've been hearing they have a large geographical footprint, they need a variety of different both low latent, high latent and mission-critical types of connectivity. And so they were really looking at then how could they utilize these like suite of tools to build their own sort of networks. And what's emerged out of those sorts of use cases, I think, is really interesting and that the idea of what's a private network and what's a public network is sort of blurring as let's think about a vehicle or a phone or whatever sort of migrates between a private network and a public cellular network and the satellite. And the idea of who can be a carrier, why couldn't an EV company or a retailer or an enterprise company become their own public carrier. So I think there's really sort of an exciting inflection point that's happening right now.

Yes, I think that's super important. And I think it's an area where Band 53 and Globalstar are a great partner for Deborah or any of these other large companies looking to roll out terrestrial or satellite connectivity. Like why now, Deborah, like why is Band 53 interesting and more usable for you today?

Well, I think it's been a pain point for a while. It's something that 10 years ago, it was a problem we were looking to solve. I think this has been sort of like that innovation cycle in that journey. But now the impetus is stronger than ever. The automation, the telemetry updates, the auto company we're talking to, that's a 6 gigabyte update per day per vehicle, and that was 2 gigabytes more than it was last year. So I think we -- and I was just -- actually we did a site survey at a food manufacturing facility and the urgency that they were bringing in robotics and bring in automation really drove that point home that now we need access to that critical piece of spectrum and you need that with the reliability that unlicensed can't give you, and the ubiquitous sort of access across the -- I mean, it really is, I don't think we've ever found quite such an amazing solution to this particular set of problems.

Okay. So Neset, let's go with the same sequence. If you explain to us what Telit do and what you have been focusing on?

I am Neset Yalcinkaya from Telit Cinterion. First of all, I started my career at Globalstar back in 1999, fresh graduate out of USC. My first task was Globalstar to build up a network around the world. So it was very exciting time. So it has a dear position in my heart. So I wanted to say that. I am -- we are the biggest Western module vendor. So there's a few left in the Western world. And we have been supporting this for about 25 years and recently with the CBRS, we started developing private network modules. And with -- we've been working with Tamer and the team on CBRS enabled n48 and we've seen an opportunity and we see an uptake in terms of volume because for us, volume is everything. And we are the enabler, we are the building block in a device without a module, the IoT devices, data devices, mobile broadband devices is not going to pick up. So we have to make these modules go certify, make it available for device ecosystem pickup. Once you build it, people will come and use it. So that's why we see a big potential with n53 and we're making the module.

Yes, if you can explain maybe more what's different between a module and a chipset? And what do you really [indiscernible]?

So basically, with the module guys, if you think of them, we are packaging people. So we package the chipset. We go test, verify, certify, and we scale up. We support the customers like their startups could be big, but it doesn't matter. They don't have that relationship with the chipset guys. It's very difficult for chipset guys to deal with thousands of customers, so become very critical to enable the ecosystem. So that's how we start. They start with the chipset. They enable it in the chipset. We take it. We put them in a module. It could be a single band or it could be a global module that goes across the globe. That's how I started. But we start with -- look at the business case, right, of course, everything -- there's a cost associated with it. So we have to look at the business case and the volume and opportunity in the long run. The other opportunity could be strategic in this case as well, not on the volume, but the strategic. So you look at those aspects and enable our module.

Great. So we started working together on n48 sometime go and then earlier this year, we decided to support n53, you guys decided to support n53. If you can touch on the motivation because still new spectrum and opportunities are still happening. How do you see it?

So the potential is basically the used cases, right? I mean private networks has been a very important topic. It's definitely growing and n48 started enabling it. But n53 being a dedicated spectrum is very important in private networks. There are certain applications like I talked about before, like retail and then mining drones and robotics are very critical, and these really require 5G spectrum to be able to operate. So for that reasons, we see a big potential. That's why we are enabling n53.

Just to add to that, I think what's exciting is with the talent module and n53, we're starting to see that conversion from WiFi that's not working, it's not providing that seamless connectivity. I think what's really great about the XCOM is that it alleviates that problem with the handoff. So it's a robust sort of moving around a factory, you need -- you have that seamless connectivity in n53 and then the module is actually -- you can retrofit existing robotics and automation, which I think it's exciting to see that turnover.

For us, if the chipset enables it, which multiples of chipset lenders that you have mentioned enabled it, and Qualcomm is the biggest partner for us. So we have 95% of our portfolio based on that. So once it's enabled, it is really -- it's not a head of lift for us to actually enable it. So that makes it very cost effective. And then we can go and certify with FCC another regulatory bodies and then so we can make it available. Once you have it in available, we have multiples of customers already asking for it. So that's the good news. Thank you, guys. Thank you very much. It's good to be here.

Okay, guys. So I will be covering the second asset for [indiscernible] network. This is XCOM RAN. XCOM RAN is the technology I've been working on for the last 5 years, almost started from scratch from the pen and paper. And the easiest way to present what this technology is about is to explain to you what other traditional deployments do. We have in this room 4 radios because we plan to show a demo at the end of this session. But having 4 radios in an area like this 2,400 square feet is a very dense kind of a deployment. Then as in -- there are a lot of problems that's happen when we put radios next to each other like that. And it's usually avoided. But sometimes you cannot. And you cannot -- the main reason is if the application you're trying to run is very heavy application, application that requires a level of performance beyond the capability of single radio, you need to add more. But when you add more, you run into all these problems that Paul covered earlier. You need to do handover. There's a lot of crosstalks. Imagine these cities are very close to each other. So it could be serving others like you could be served by that radio or somebody else, served by this radio very close they crosstalk, they disrupt each other. XCOM RAN is a concept that is very, very different, and it's really -- I like to think of it as a revolution in the way you're on network, where these radios act together as a part of a super cell that has the capability of all the radios. So super cell is kind of an umbrella coverage technology, where every time you add a radio, you are adding capabilities more to this system. So you have an application that requires more -- you add more, and this is how you get to support the application. You remove all the intricacies that we discussed. You remove the interference, you remove the handover. You don't really spend a lot of time making -- planning it in a way that these boundaries interact properly and stop. We just put them on a grid and that's it. Now the technology we have it on any band. It can be in any band. As a matter of fact, when we started, we did it on CBRS, like most of the private network vendors, providers. And then we can also do it for MNOs. But lately, after we joined Global stock, n53 came across as another possibility and a very big possibility for us to increase the scope of all the use cases that we can do with this technology. And the reason is n53, as Kyle covered earlier, is dedicated. So for mission critical application, even if the technology can do all of this and you lose the spectrum, of course, that doesn't help. Anthony, can I switch or?

Set the podium.

Set the podium. Sorry. So the importance actually of creating new use cases, I think it's in the heart of the proposition that we have here because we believe that the 5G private networks have not been meeting it's hype, I would say, because of the fact that we are not really opening new use cases. The use cases that are available now for 5G are the same use cases that have been available for 4G. As a matter of fact, you can find any use case supported by 4G and supported by 5G as we speak now in any of the applications that people talk about in private networks. And these all use cases are kind of sliver the use cases that WiFi cannot cover. So you kind of squeezed. The idea for us when we started thinking about the technology 5 years ago was how can we get the promise of 5G and support as many applications as we can, especially the most demanding one. That is the focus of XCOM RAN. And that's the way also we plan to go-to-market as I'll be covering later or what use cases are we talking about? There are many use cases we can mention here, but you can convince yourself easily is that when you have a use case with many devices, many users would require many radios. If you are not able to put radios together close to identify them, you will not be able to meet this. But there are applications that are very demanding in their nature. So applications like enterprise versus reality, for example, you can have a very high speed requirement, but very low latency requirement, but very high reliability requirement. So there are applications that are hard to meet as is. And I claim that technology like XCOM RAN, something similar to XCOM RAN. It's the only technology that can put the maximum number of users on a given piece of spectrum for application like that. And I know that this is a big claim, and it's not typical that technologies and wireless come like that. But I really invite you guys to pay attention to the technology and go know about it because it is, in many ways, game changing. Now I want to touch on one application, which is important, has been important to us when we were bringing up this system in 2023. We tried multiple applications demanding ones. Then we had the opportunity that Paul discussed earlier of partnering with this great U.S. retailer in their MFC systems. We spent like 3 quarters doing technology trial and the first [ PO ] we had from them was early in January. What is MFC and what did we do for them? I'd like to run it with you, it would be easier to get it across. [Presentation]

Okay. Hopefully, you guys like it. Just a few words on the go-to-market strategy because it's important. First, we choose to segment the market by use cases first and focus on the use cases, where we have the most differentiation. The idea is that we go to a segment that we know we can, if not enable it, we can make it much easier to deploy. So the first one for us has been this MFC or warehouse automation in general. And really, they chose us we haven't given a lot of thought of choosing them at this stage. So that's what we call the high-end automation and enterprise. We may add a second segment. But again, we start with 1 or 2, a few customers, and we move on, add more features to have more better and better alignment between the market and the product. Of course, obviously, if we are really enabling the market or enabling the segment, the competition is low, and we have the highest proposition, the value proposition there. There is a set of other use cases that we think also we are differentiated they're enough there. But there isn't a very ideal product market alignment yet. So we'll keep our eyes on them. If the opportunity presents itself to us, we will jump on them. Then I want to mention something in the model that is important, but we can go to it -- we can have a customer, it could be an MFC use case. But the [ costs ] are also on the other use cases for private networks, for example, covering the stores for RFID reader or something like that. We collect these use cases. So we penetrate the segment from the highest value for us, then we collect other use cases of private networks as we go. This is a high level, the strategy and we are in the first, I would say, the first customer, first segment, I mean, in automation. This is just to give you a feel for the TAM of the market. This is a report that was put out by SNS, Telecom and IT in 2024. We singled out these differentiating segments that we'll talk about that we think that we really can enable and they are here -- these 2 sets together, they make around 35% of the TAM according to this report. They also increase over time as you can see there are significant part of the TAM and the increase over time. So we think we have good market to target. Okay. So at the last part before showing you the demo. And I thought that you just see -- you just know what is the system? What does the system look like? This is an XCOM RAN system. It is based on something called ORAN architecture. It's called split 7-2, you guys want to look at us. But it's based on our architecture. It works with devices as is. There is no requirement for devices already, software hardware, nothing at all. It's off-shelf devices. So they were showing you the system with off-shelf devices. So we have a component here, the radio component, the components like these radios that are around you. That connects to a server where it runs the stack and the technology together. So most of the IP is really here. This piece doesn't have a lot of IP, but it's an important -- very important piece, so we also won it. We sell the end-to-end system. We can also partner, but we have the way that the whole system end-to-end. I think at this point, I will move to the demo, but before calling on my colleagues here to join me I want to say 2 things. One, this is the first ever 5G on n53 demonstration. So this is really the first time ever. And it has happened to be XCOM RAN, which makes me personally very happy. Second, this is not yet a product. It will be product in Q1 next year. So we are under performance optimization phase. So we dialed down the system. So the numbers in terms of absolute, you will find them to be -- they should be half what we should be able to do in a quarter from now. But the relative performance of what we do in XCOM RAN versus the traditional deployment and the value of it, I think, will be clear in this demonstration. So my colleague, Ashar Zia, is the Head of IT and XCOM RAN. And you can -- you will walk us through.

Yes. Thank you, [ Tamer ], and thank you, everyone, for giving us the opportunity to show you the live demonstration of XCOM RAN over the n53 spectrum. What -- so I'll begin with what we have over here right now is we have 4 radios deployed in this room, if you look around, they are all 4 corners of this room. Each of these radios are 44 hertz that means they have 4 antennas on each, which can receive and transmit. Each of these radios are then wired through a fiber cable back into a server. There is a server in the back of the room, which is basically hosting the rest of the 5G stack, which includes the CU, DU and the 5G core as well. What I'm going to show you over here, this is the dashboard of the system. This is going to show you as we walk through the whole demo -- and so that's the network side of things. To complete the ecosystem, we also have the devices that we are using right now as part of the demo. We have 3 devices today, 3 different vendor devices today. One is this one that I have up here. This is a Quectel device. It's operating in USB dongle mode right now, and it is connected to this laptop, which basically makes this laptop a 5G connected device right now. We'll use this to show a few things. We also have a tele device that's sitting right back there, and we will -- that is also connected to our 5G RAN. And then we also have some iPhones that are connected that will go through in the later part. So to start the demo today, what we have to begin with as we start the demonstration, we have configured the system and where we have disabled the XCOM technology. So it's running in a baseline 5G mode, which is how a normal 5G cell from any other vendor or that's the theoretical 5G cell. And with these 4 radios, all of them are still active. So when we are running in the baseline 5G mode, this is equivalent to a DAS system, which is very popular in terms of go to deployment. In that system, you get the coverage expansion, but you never get the capacity increase. So this is going to behave as a DAS system right now as we start. So to begin with, what I'm going to do here is me actually give you a little insight on the dashboard. So on the dashboard, you are primarily seeing two colors. One is green, which is referring to everything in the downlink, meaning anything that is coming from the network towards the device. Everything blue is referring to uplink. That means that is the data that we are sending up from the device to the network side. What you see over here is the performance metric. So to read this number, if you see a number close to 100, that's the peak capacity of baseline 5G cell. Then we have the throughput numbers. This is absolute throughput numbers. So that will show you the data that's ongoing. These are the graphs that will show you the uplink and downlink throughput. And then we have the 4 devices over here. These are the 4 devices. So you can see each individual device doing some data rate that will accumulate up into this number. Out of the 3 devices, 1 of the devices is going to do video stream. So what we are trying to show over here is where we are going to start the demo is the first device that's going to -- that's sitting right here. And I'm going to start it with a video stream. All right. So this is the video stream and you will see some data rate showing up. This is a live 4K transmission. So basically, we're transmitting at 4K speeds in general, a 4K video would require if you're doing a live stream, it would require about 25 Mbps of a connection. So this is what it is generally how the video streaming works is, it would buffer a little and then will continue to run and then it will buffer again. So you'll see that device is showing up over there. That number correlates to the cell throughput, right now there's nothing else running. So what -- the next step that we are going to do is this is the video stream that's getting streamed from this laptop over 5G. The first thing that we are going to do is we're going to add uplink throughput on each of these devices. So with 10 megahertz, what you see over here is you'll see each of the uplink throughput devices. The peak throughput that you can achieve on uplink is about 13 Mbps and there we are. So we're pushing now right now applying traffic from each of the 4 devices, which is accumulating up until up into 13 Mbps, which is a cell capacity. Cell capacity will always be shared in a 5G baseline itself. The next thing I want to point out is...

Second, just to look at the numbers that on the downlink, it's around 32 megabit per second and then the uplink aggregate is around 30 megabit per second. That is more or less the capacity of a traditional system baseline 5G.

Yes. So to continue, what I want to show next is I want to start doing some downlink traffic on the rest of the 4 devices -- rest of the 3 devices, while the first one continues to video stream. So we're starting to push. And now we see the peak throughput that was about 30 Mbps is now getting shared between all 4 devices, which brings down the video streaming device to getting capped at some number and which causes basically your 4K stream to break. So this is currently, whatever was buffered, it's going to continue until there, and then you'll start noticeably the video will start to flicker. Generally, the buffer is about -- of about 15 seconds. So as soon as we hit that 15-second mark, the video is going to start.

You can see actually keeps bumping -- stopping.

So it is trying to move, but the pipe doesn't support.

It's just that the scene is very odd. But look at the water -- the movement of the water [indiscernible].

Right. So at this point, we are basically maxed out the 10 megahertz capacity. There is nothing else that any cell would be able to do beyond this capacity, right? So that's where we -- when we bring in -- so I'll again want your attention on how these 4 radios are going to combine and they're going to multiply the capacity of the cell. It does not matter in this case, where -- all of my devices are sort of co-located over there, but they still continue to get the gains from all 4 radios. So it doesn't matter where in the coverage map these devices are co-located, they will still continue to benefit out of the that you get from this RAN. So now we're going to Switch to -- we have already switched. Okay. So this is the XCOM RAN. Now I wanted to get your attention towards what happened over here in -- so 100 is what your capacity is when you're looking at a baseline 5G. As soon as we turn on our technology, what you see right now is the capacity multiplied 4x. So we are at about 400% on the uplink for sure. On the downlink, it is somewhere there because the video stream requirements are a little lower. So it's going to keep fluctuating between 300% and 400%. But theoretically, we can easily go up to 400%, which is exactly the 4x gain on the downlink.

So again, just again, look at the same numbers, the 32 became 100 almost and the 13 became like 52, when we turned on the technology. Again, all these numbers in absolute sense should double 2x to 2.5x in a quarter, we're dialing down the performance a bit.

So yes, and from each individual device perspective, we are basically -- each of them is getting their own throughput as of full-scale throughput because it's 4x. So yes, that's the beef of the demo, where we wanted to show the 4x gain. And then in addition to this, we also forgot to point out that the registry continues then as it was jittering before, it doesn't happen anymore because the device gets the full throughput, so it continues to stream. I would -- we have a few iPhones over here as well that because the modules that we have massively enables every IoT device. But from the consumer perspective, there's also smartphones that would enable. So we have iPhones that are connected to our network and we can pass them around. You can do some YouTube and just experience the network itself. It is connected to Globalstar 5G. You will see it in your drop-down. So we'll pass around a few. Thank you for your attention, and I hope you are impressed by the demo as much as we are excited to present it to you. This does really significantly increase.

These are phones that you can see on the can pass them around. You can use them. But you can see Globalstar Network to be the network that they're connected. So we are not connected to the outside world with anything. You can see it's a Globalstar here. So these are the -- so basically, we turned everything up for them. They are running on these 4 radios. And we can show how to connect the phone is also a very simple thing. Maybe you can have one of these QR codes just [ software ] for depiction. What you do is that. Yes, okay. You can deal with this.

Okay. So I'll need that. So in order to get a phone on our network is essentially as simple as scanning ASM QR code. These -- the network profiles are all eSIM-enabled, so an iPhone can scan a QR code and basically get on the network. So this -- I have a device in hand. It takes about a few minutes to get it activated. All you need is basically a phone, which is WiFi connected, and you just have to get into the cellular and generally, if you have ever activated the QR code, you just have to use the QR code and generally, how it would show up as you'll get the activate the eSIM your Globalstar eSIM profile is ready to be activated. You just will continue and we'll start activation process. So it goes out, it talks, it is very secure. So it's following all the security standards that are on offer from 3GPP and SMTB plus. And so basically, you get all the complete security, your data is all secured. And so it will -- yes, it will just go through the cycle for about 3, 4 minutes and should activate on this network as well.

Okay. Thanks, Ashar. I appreciate it. Thank you, guys.

Good morning to you all, and thank you for being with us today. My name is Mersad Cavcic. I'm the CMO of Globalstar. You have heard Paul earlier referred to our satellite constellation as a platform for innovation. Well, some of that innovation started long ago. Retail consumer and IoT business segments for us have been around for nearly 2 decades. Retail consumer business segment, our spot brand, is a set of consumer solutions for off-grid satellite messaging and tracking. Globalstar was an early pioneer in this space. We discovered and developed this market segment. Large thanks to our innovation mindset and customer focus. Today, 20 years later, SPOT remains a strong anchor for our mobile satellite services business. At the end of 2023, we counted nearly 260,000 subscribers responsible for $44 million in annual service revenue. Earlier this year, we celebrated 10,000 rescue initiated by a SPOT device. SPOT represents a strong brand, particularly in Outdoor Adventure segment with a lower customer base. And today, you can buy SPOT Gen 4, SPOT Trace, SPOT X at various retailers. You can find that our REI, you can find it at Cabela's, at Amazon and other retailers as well. Couple of years ago, we did make a strategic decision to support satellite messaging and emergency services in the direct-to-device domain. We expected and as Paul mentioned before, to see an impact to the revenue of our retail consumer segment, but SPOT has continued to maintain a steady heartbeat since then and remains a significant revenue stream for us. So moving forward, in terms of market opportunity, we will continue to promote SPOT family of products for both consumer and enterprise segments. Enterprise market is actually expanding and accounts for 1/4 of our total subscriptions today. Accordingly, we will consider making targeted investment in growth segments like loan worker on the enterprise side. These are individuals that perform important work in the areas of no coverage. So SPOT gives them a cost-effective and much-needed capability to track, check in and ask for help too. We are tracking market conditions closely. We want to try to understand the change trends that we're in the middle of. Our productmarketing team is busy interviewing retail distribution channel partners. We're also fielding surveys with general public. In one recent survey we conducted 89% of respondents said that durability and ruggedness of their satellite communications device is important, and 97% of respondents said that the battery life of their device is important or very important. So we believe that there will be a continued need for purpose-built satellite messengers. The spot journey will continue and saving lives is in every part of the world. Shifting gears to commercial IoT, this is an even bigger opportunity for us. In 2024, the market size reached $2.4 billion, supporting various market verticals like transportation and logistics, fleet management, oil and gas, animal tracking and health monitoring as well as others. Today, there are 13 million satellite IoT connections around the world. By 2032, that number is expected to grow to over $80 million. That will represent a total addressable market of over just $6 billion with a healthy CAGR of 4%. This is a market worth winning. So we have invested in this space starting nearly 2 decades ago. At the end of 2023, we had 481,000 active IoT subscribers accounting for $23 million in annual revenue in the recent period since 2020, we have delivered 94,000 net adds, representing 7% CAGR. Technology driving our IoT business today is exclusively Simplex, meaning one-way communication. This started out of a necessity in the early 2000s. We had some forward link capability failures on our satellites. Those satellites since have been replaced. But the Simplex technology remained. It evolved into a true differentiator for market segments that demand unique profile, when it comes to cost, size, weight and power consumption. Our one-way modem SDX, SDX3 is approximately the size of a quarter, weighs only 4 grams and is available at price points similar to cellular IoT modems. SDX3-based products can run on AAA batteries for multiple years. Our global coverage deliver diversity across market verticals and geographies. North America leads the way with about 70% of our subscriber base, 50% of which comes from the United States, another 20% from Canada. But we do have strong presence in Europe, Asia, Latin America, where Brazil earned a category of its own. Our market vertical distribution side, oil and gas subscribers lead the way with about 47%, very significant representation from transportation and logistics from telematics and fast-growing animal tracking. We have built an impressive VAR network over the years. We have 46 of VAR partners with at least 1,000 subscribers. Animal tracking partners have seen fantastic growth recently. Our one-way technology with unmatched cost, size, weight and power consumption is truly making a difference and driving growth. Today, we will take a closer look at this particular market vertical with 3 of our partners. I would like to welcome to our first panel discussion, Jeff Palmer, Founder and CEO of Global Satellite Engineering; David Smith, CEO and Co-Founder of Ceres Tag and Halvor Mjøen, CTO and founder of Findmy. Thank you all for making a trip. Much appreciated. I know Jeff, you came from Florida. David is originally from Australia, but he recently relocated to Kansas and then Halvor you came all the way from Norway. So we much appreciate you being here today. So we'll kick it off, Jeff, with you. First question, just tell us about GSE, what you do and how we partner together?

Yes. Great. Global Satellite Engineering is an innovative satellite IoT company. We're protecting animals and saving species. 20 years ago, Global Satellite Engineering started in my living room. We were designing a solution for aircraft to transmit video from and to anywhere in the world. And it's evolved a lot since then. It's a very exciting and fun project for us at the time, our goals is to design and create solutions for the market, right? GSAT track is our visualization and management platform, where we host 0.5 million devices today. And integrate data from 200 manufacturers and really where we identified this gap in the market for animal tracking and why Globalstar is the only solution that can do this. We designed and created the GSAT solar series, which is a 1-ounce product that can mount on ears, collars and a variety of animals. It's very lightweight, small and powerful and excited to build the technology that improves the world and interested in meeting everyone here today. So thank you.

Jeff, I don't mean to put you on the spot, but would you happen to have an example of your product with you.

Absolutely. So this is the GSAT solar, right? It is 1 ounce and this is a complete product, solar panel, battery, transmitter, GPS, accelerometer, connects to your phone by a Bluetooth, very easy to configure and manage.

Very good. Thank you, Jeff. David, tell us about Ceres Tag.

Thank you. So Ceres Tag is an animal health intelligence platform. So we don't just monitor location, but we use machine learning on top of the platform to then enhance the animal health, welfare performance and climate impact that those animals have on the land. We're doing this right throughout the livestock and wildlife conservation. And it's really critical in your food security and also in the wildlife conservation areas.

Thank you, David. Halvor, I particularly like how your story started. Can you tell us about Findmy?

Yes. So our story starts back in 2009. So I'm a son of a sheep farmer and my sister took over the farm in 2009, and we wanted to expand the sheep house and grow the population of adult sheep, but that gracing system we lost about 22% of our lambs. So there were nowhere to be found, and we have vast amounts of creating areas, and it's in very rural areas. And it's also like in the National Park area. So September, October, that year, me and my sister and her husband, we went into the mountains trying to locate the last lambs, and we were unable to find them. So we are thinking like this is 2009, it has to be some sort of way of tracking them. So we went back home and we did our research and we soon figured out that most of the tracking solutions available in the market was cellular based. And since we are in that region, we are, that was not an option. So we decided to keep a track -- try to build our own device. And we soon came across Globalstar. And so it was -- we wanted to buy -- to build something that could really solve our own problem. So -- but -- so that in 2010, we built our first devices. But the thing was that the neighbor also had the same issues. So we started selling a couple of devices to him, and then the next town had the same issues. And any kind of snowball from there. So today, we have around 50,000 trackers on the network. We have received over 50 million positions via the Globalstar network, since our startup and we are mainly in Norway, Sweden and Finland, doing sheep and cattle, but also we're doing a lot of reindeer now in the recent years.

David, I'll go to you with our next question. We certainly appreciate your partnership. I'd love to hear about your perspective on the other side of that, why Globalstar?

Well, when we started the development of Ceres Tag, we wanted -- I knew straight away I am engineering background that it had to be via satellite. There was no way you could actually scale the platform unless you actually did via satellite. Globalstar's unique position enabled us to produce a very small -- you can see it's about half the size of a credit card, very small sensor, lightweight, low power and could stay on it for the life of the animal during its whole tenure. So those were critical aspects that allowed us to develop. And then what we did then is enhance the actual platform. So we take the chipset and we put it on our own type of board with the machine learning. Now tracking is very, very good. But once you start to enhance it with health and welfare and performance, so how much did the animal eat and how much methane does it produce? Whatever is its phenotypes, it's genetics, all of this sort of information is coming from this device. And really because of Globalstar's ability to allow us to communicate that we're really enhancing the whole beef supply chain. So we've recently scaling our platform quite substantially, and it's great to be a partner and I'll talk about more of that in the third question.

David, I have a follow-up question for you. You've tried this with cellular IoT, that was particularly challenging in terms of coverage. Would you please share a little bit of that from your perspective?

Yes, absolutely. So the -- I've recently come back from Tennessee and we knew this in Australia. But hearing it from the U.S., where 80% of the extensive or free range cattle are on Grassy Hill-type country, it's not flat. Cellular technologies just don't work. You just have too many black spots, and it just doesn't scale. So it's quite frustrating. And it's been one of the limitations up until recently, why the tracking of animals by us just hasn't enhanced, but satellite certainly unlocks all of that.

Jeff, why Globalstar for GSE?

Yes. It's a combination of network capabilities, size, weight and power are all amazing points. It operates in L-band, which happens to also be very near the GPS band. We get to utilize a shared antenna for both satellite transmissions as well as acquiring location data and operating on the LEO network, when we get multiple signal paths to a satellite to transmit each location, results in a very high success rate of Simplex transmissions for animal location data.

You've also looked at some other technology options like LoRa LAN. Can you tell us about how that went and what your perspective is?

Yes. So we see a number of competing technologies, deploying private but public use of spectrum like LoRa, Sigfox, et cetera, trying to cover ranches in large territories that have complex terrains and farmers and ranchers are not engineers. Maintaining, managing, deploying these solutions are much too difficult and outside the speciality of what they're trying to achieve. And doing this over satellite, whether you have 1 animal or 1,000 animals, you simply tag them in a shoot and ship them to pasture and your solution is done.

Halvor, you give us a preview of how things started, but why Globalstar for you?

Well, first, I can confirm what Jeff is saying here that farmers are not -- don't want to maintain infrastructure. They want a device that works and so in choosing Globalstar, the network capacity was the biggest selling point for us because the animals need to be online. And we need to have like the real-time tracking of the devices. So during the years, we had a lot of competitors doing the cellular thing, popping up message and stuff like that. And kind of claiming that it was a real-time tracking system. But the thing is that if the animal gets sick or dies in area, where you don't have any cellular coverage, the farmer will never get that message. So in Norway today, there's a generationship for farmers and now the young farmers are taking over, and they kind of demand that they have some sort of tracking system because in Norway, you don't have many full-time farmers anymore. They are working different jobs, and they don't have the limitation being kind of tied down to the farm all the time. So having a network that allows them to monitor the sheep all the time kind of allows them and makes it actually more attractive to come home and take over the family farms. So I think the technology that Globalstar provides really helps the farmer and for also the next generation.

Halvor, let's keep going. So for the last question, what do you expect from 2025 and beyond?

Yes. So now we kind of -- the market is -- we have a very mature product. We have good increase in numbers in the Scandinavian countries. So we're now expanding into new markets in Europe and especially as we just opened up a new office in Spain. So we did pilots there this year. We're going commercial here in 2025. So in Norway, there's about 800,000 to 900,000 adult sheep. In Spain, there are 15 million sheep. So that's a huge market. And we can see that they have a lot of the same challenges that the Norwegian farmer has as well, a lot of creditors. And also in Spain, they're having now issues with a lot of wildfires. So the government is now subsidizing the farmers to buy more tracking gear, so they can put the sheet out in Mountain to Grace down in the mountains. So if there's wildfires, stuff like that, it won't spread as much. So we're seeing like a very good opportunity in Spain. And also we're looking at France and U.K. And -- so that's for like a number of trackers, but we're also seeing that the demand for more data is there because the farmers are not now -- they don't just want to dot on a map, they also want health insights, pasture insight, soil management. So the tracker that started out as like just a tracker is now sort of going into more a gateway type of situation, where it can connect to other devices sensor around and to uplink that data to the customers.

Jeff, 2025 and beyond. What you expect?

Yes, 2025 is exciting, especially with new product lines like this. We easily see a 2 to 4x growth in the GSAT Solar series alone. In 2025, we will be selecting a large market-specific partner to work with for delivering the product direct-to-consumer. New features come out on our product line in firmware every month. Just this month, we enabled motion triggers usage accounting and accumulation by the accelerometer, working on machine learning and AI integration into the platform to make that a more relevant. We're also releasing a new GPU accelerated map interface to visualize your herd data in a more meaningful way. And expansion into the cattle markets. On the slide on the end there, we have some of the totals of market size for these verticals and really don't really ever realize that there's 1.5 billion cattle. There's -- it's an absolutely massive market. But personally most excited about conservation. Just today, we heard that we're assisting with a project in Jordan, where there's only 200 Gazelle in the wild, and we're deploying terminals to monitor and manage and help a very endangered species. And those are exciting projects to me.

David, I'll lead here a little bit with a statement that you've just recently moved from Australia to Kansas for the sake of growth. So tell us a little bit about 2025 and beyond for Ceres Tag.

Yes. Well, it is a very exciting 2025 and beyond for us. We've just been funded by a very large private family office in Kansas City. That has changed our business considerably. We've moved our manufacturing from Taiwan to Malaysia, upscale the manufacturing by tenfold. We've reduced the price of the sensors by 40%. So we're really growing the company significantly. I've taken on 2 new directors. One is a director of one of the largest animal health companies, plus the Chief Investment Officer of the Family Office. I've just employed the CFO of the world's fifth biggest animal health company. We've placed an order for 21,000 chipsets, which then, of course, then goes on to the communication systems. We think that's just the tip of the iceberg. The reason being is there's a massive demographic shift in the industry. So to digital native, better educated people out there actually ranching that need this information. There's also regulatory changes such as the EU deforest-free supply chain, and we do have sensors in the Amazon at this time. There's about -- just to give you an idea of the scope, there's about $20 billion worth of beef to go to the EU over the next 5 years that's at risk of not getting delivered if they can't prove that it's not coming out of deforested areas. So we're at the forefront of a lot of this sort of stuff, and this scaling is really going to make a considerable difference to the world and to the way we look at food and the way we get information about food, increasing traceability, decreasing biosecurity risk, improving the asset management of it all. It's just an incredible time to be doing what we're doing. I mean it's really on the point of inflection right now.

Thank you all very much. We much appreciate you coming today and sharing your customer perspective and insights. Thank you. So our existing One-Way technology, products and processes will continue driving growth in market verticals that benefit from cost, size, weight and power consumption. And that's with a total cost of ownership model that enables those use cases as we've heard from our panelists now. This represents really the first layer of value in our IoT strategy in Globalstar's IoT strategy. We expect continued growth from One-Way products and services and animal tracking and health monitoring is just one example of why skipped a little bit. Now some customers, some use cases and market verticals fundamentally require capability beyond what we can offer them today with one-way capability, one-way technology. For them, we have been working on bringing to market a new technology with 2-way capability. This is a development board of our Two-Way RM200 module. The module itself is very small. It's the size of approximately 2 quarters next to each other. You can see at the top of this Board. The Board itself development kit allows our customers to experience functionality of our Two-Way network and our Two-Way module before they decide to build their own products with this module. We expect RM200 Two-Way module to enter beta trials with select customers in Q1 of 2025. It comes with a differentiated feature set. First and foremost, it supports command control and acknowledgment messages. And that is opening up new use cases and new market verticals for Globalstar. It comes at half the price of other satellite IoT modems available on the market. That is supposed to collapse the entry barrier for faster adoption and market growth. And the last but not least, RM200 supports both satellite and IoT connectivity from the same hardware stack. That convergence of space-based, satellite-based IoT and terrestrial-based IoT, we think is a real opportunity for additional growth. Why does that matter? Well, this gives us Globalstar a very near-term opportunity to grow IoT segment through increased market share. The customers that used to address their command control, acknowledgment requirements with competing solutions can now do that with us. They can do that with Globalstar. Berg Insight Satellite IoT report estimates this near to midterm opportunity to be worth about $250 million and maybe more. With additional capability and value, we also expect to grow through increased ARPU. We will hear the customer perspective and insights on our two-way capability in our second IoT panel today, I would like to welcome Dr. Alex Katko, VP of Product Engineering at Globalstar. Alex's team was responsible for developing the 2-way module RM200. That makes him the perfect candidate to moderate the next panel. David Goldstein, President and CEO of Asset Link Global; and Jamie Williams, President of TGI Connect. Welcome.

Thanks, [indiscernible]. We are going to run through a fairly quick panel here before we head on to break time fairly soon. I want to talk with David and Jamie a little bit about kind of what they do now, what our new technology enables them to do and then what we're going to be doing in the future. So maybe we can start out with Jamie first. Tell us a little bit about TGI Connect about what you do and about what 2-way technology really means. What does that allow you to do?

Good morning, everybody. My name is Jamie Williams. I'm the President of TGI Connect. We are Canada's largest trailer tracking company. We're in 50% of the top 25 fleets in Canada. So we offer trailer tracking solutions. We're growing in the U.S. as well. We're probably one of the fastest-growing trailer tracking companies in the U.S. as well. What 2-way enables us to do is move from the trailer to the cab, and that is very exciting for us.

So can you tell us a little bit more about that? What does it mean to move from the trailer to the cab?

So I'll just give a little background. Typically, the truck trailer ratio in North America is 3:1. So there's 3 trailers to every 1 moving truck down the road. So when you see a truck pulling a trailer, there's typically 2 trailers that are parked either in their yards at a customer's location or somewhere that they have to know where their assets are. So for a trucking company, the most important thing is getting true utilization of all their assets, not only their trucks, but also their trailers. Coverage is probably the most important thing. If there's a truck or trailer in a certain area of the country that has limited to no cell coverage, then that truck and trailer are basically off the grid for them. So that's where we find where it's most important.

Perfect. Thanks, Jamie. So similar question to you, David. Can you tell us a little bit about what Asset Link does and about what 2-way really helps you to do?

So I'm David Goldstein, Founder, President and CEO of Asset Link Global. We see IoT as really a layer. It's not a separate industry, but it's a layer that layers on top of other types of technologies that every industry is using to improve their operations, improve their efficiency, profitability. So we are essentially a super VAR. We help get value-added resellers into the business of using IoT and help them understand how to leverage satellite technology, how to leverage different systems, different networks, different sensors, all the different components, we call it asset to API. So what we find is that the software side is relatively straightforward and has a low barrier to entry for a lot of resellers. But that component of building the hardware, this is an example of our -- one of our flagship products, which goes on oil and gas equipment, military logistics, industrial monitoring. That process of developing a device that will last for 10 years at the edge using very low resources, never need to be touched, hazardous location safe and then identifying what's the right network to bring back, transport that data back and then deliver it via API to the user, that asset to API segment is very complex and very high risk, and we help VARs and resellers get into that business in a whole variety of markets.

Awesome. And I know you've been doing some work with shipping and tracking things in, let's say, very hazardous areas in the world over time, working with some of our government and defense-related assets. Can you tell us a little bit about that, what 2-way really helps out with that kind of market?

Sure. So we, for example, tracked about 80% of the cargo going in and out of Afghanistan during that period of the global war on terror using Globalstar systems. That was using Simplex. Now there's a real push across the DoD for what's called assured logistics, contested logistics, if you're on the other side of -- if you're on offense rather than defense. And that is extremely -- one of the things that's extremely essential for that is having confirmed response that your data actually went through. So 2-way is critical for that. You need an acknowledgment. And in large segments of DoD, they're not comfortable just with a one-way simplex anymore. They want that 2-way. Similarly, more sensors are going into these devices to understand whether doors are opening or closing, temperatures, pressures, both in military and also in industrial IoT, which is tank level monitoring, railcars. There's a lot of temperature and tank levels that are -- that need to be monitored. That data has a bunch of smarts at the edge to set thresholds when is there an alarm, when is there an alert. The 2-way capability really is essential for being able to reset those thresholds, update things on the move. It's no longer enough to have, as one of the previous panelists said, just a dot on the map, you need that interactive aspect in these markets.

Well, that leads next to why Globalstar. I mean we have this 2-way technology that we're extremely excited to get into your and other select customers' hands coming up in the next quarter. But what is it about our 2-way that really differentiates us? Why should somebody choose us?

There are a lot of different elements that need to overlap to create the ideal solution for large fleets of equipment and users to come on Board. High-value equipment already is tagged, already has data. But there are whole levels of the market pyramid that are orders of magnitude larger in quantity that need to have that low cost. So one of the critical aspects about Globalstar, we've worked with Globalstar for over 20 years. And one of the things we really like about it is that it is a very low resource-intensive deployment at the edge. So it's really designed because of the bent pipe aspect, because of the architecture of the system, the device at the edge can be extremely low power, extremely low cost, extremely small. And that is one of the essential elements for getting this larger group of assets. Right now, we have a large amount of latent demand that we see with some customers that have already tagged their high-value assets where they say, we want to tag more, but we need 2-way, we need satellite coverage, and we need to be very low cost. And we believe that the solutions coming out from Globalstar in 2025 will actually unlock that layer of the market pyramid for us.

Jamie, very similar question.

Wow, very similar answer. There's a lot of similarities between what David does and what we do. We're even though we're 100% focused in the transportation market, the transportation market is very -- the different verticals you have the refrigerated, you have high value. So we're very similar answers. One of the things that why Globalstar, Globalstar provides, we think, a competitive advantage to us. It's that reliability of data. It's very important for trucking at the end of the day. If they're not getting all that data through, they're offline. And that's important. The other thing -- the most important thing we think from a 2-way perspective is connecting that cab in that truck. So now you're going to have a connected vehicle. All the sensors that are available today through whether it's temperature sensors, cargo sensors, door sensors, weight sensors, they're all available, but that 2-way capability allows the driver to potentially find where he's got to go. It gives the driver that peace of mind that they're always in -- they're connected at all times. So they can do their job, they can feel safe. And that's really important. We're trying to bring more people into the industry. It's been a challenge over the last few years to hire and recruit new drivers. So the advancements in technology is something that these large trucking companies are using to motivate new people coming into the industry.

Well, that probably naturally leads into my last question. I mean, with transportation and logistics being such a huge potential growth area, what does 2025 and beyond look like for you?

So we're extremely bullish on 2025, and I'll tell you why. 2024, typically for trucking was a little bit of a slower year. So that's good for us because at the end of the day, that's when the trucking companies are starting to look and invest in technologies to drive out inefficiencies that are in their businesses. So the total addressable market for us is well over 7 million trailers and add an additional 1.5 million to 2 million trucks. We recently entered into a relationship with one of the largest telematic players in the game, and they're going to be using our product suite to enhance their customer experience. So we are extremely excited about 2025.

That's fantastic. And Dave will just close out. Same question. How does Asset Link look at 2025 and beyond?

We're also very excited about 2025. The 2-way capabilities from Globalstar are very much in our road map. As they're released in the second half of the year, we have products that they're going into. We have a number of customers that have very large fleets, kind of an order of magnitude larger than the fleets that we serve for them already. So we're talking $80,000 or $100,000 per fleet or per asset class for some of these organizations. And they -- we're designing a set of products that incorporate the Globalstar technology with an overall goal of lowering costs. There are a number of different areas where costs really have dropped with technology. There's a lot of talk about supply chains driving costs up, and that is true in the short term, but the longer-term trend of lower cost in power, lower cost for solar, that's continuing. So this is a part of that by integrating that the Globalstar components rather than some of the more expensive satellite modems we have, we see really a big cost decrease that will serve that market. Finally, the ability to integrate cell and sat is a huge part. We have more and more customers who want that hybrid cell plus satellite experience when they're in a cell network, they can have very rich data feeds. And then when they go out of the cellular network into satellite coverage only, it drops down to just the must-have data. Right now, that's very costly. We have to have 2 carried 2 different modems. The ability to integrate that into one very low-cost chip really can open up a lot of markets. We see that coming towards the end of 2025.

Fantastic. Thank you all. I'll turn it back over to Mersad.

Thank you, guys very much. Really, this 2-way capability represents the second layer of value in our IoT strategy and we look forward to some near- and midterm market expansion opportunities with it. We're running a little bit behind schedule, so we'll speed things up just a little bit. Globalstar is in a great position to pursue IoT at scale, which represents the third and final layer of value in our IoT strategy. We are looking to build on a diverse technology platform that includes one-way messaging, 2-way capability, even multimode with cellular IoT support. We have an operating constellation already in orbit. We have more satellite launches planned for next year. And finally, a plan for a new constellation we recently announced. Automotive industry is a massive, massive opportunity. It goes without saying 40 million vehicles, small vehicles are expected to be delivered in 2024 in top 10 countries, excluding China. There are various use cases in play, most of them requiring a low data rate. We want to make a compelling case for automotive OEMs anchored in existing products and services. We can leverage our emergency services expertise from spot to pursue e-call use case for automotive. Our transportation and logistics experience together with 2-way capability really can drive the telematics use case for automotive. But certainly, there are connectivity expectations from automotive industry like video calls and broadband Internet, which we will leave for the cellular technology, which, as a reminder, we do carry on the same chipset as our 2-way satellite module. Globalstar has been working on automotive strategy, IoT strategy this year. We formed a partnership with Peiker Holding from Germany, one of the pioneers in connected car space with their eCall and telematics solutions from early 2000s and on. So for partner perspective and insights, I would like to invite Reinhard Kromer, CIO of Peiker Holding, to join me on stage for a fireside chat. Welcome.

Thank you.

Thank you for making a trip all the way from Germany. We're excited to have you here today. We have only about 10 minutes, maybe a little bit less. Start us off with the history of Peiker Holding in the world of automotive industry, please.

I make that fairly quickly. Yes, we are a 25 years old. Actually, the company is over 80 years old, but we are 25 years in the automotive space, and we have been delivered all kinds of accessories around the mobile phones and embedded phones at that time. We've started with hands-free microphones. We went to cradle based in bluetooth car kits. We've actually also developed the first multimedia system and had been the first Apple automotive licensee when we brought the iPad into the car and finally ended up with connectivity when eCall became a requirement in the European automotive market and then went to the global market. So we have been at the end, the deliver the supplier for 2 major German car manufacturers with their telematics solutions across the Board.

We at Globalstar are really excited about this partnership, obviously. But this is -- this isn't the first time you've worked with our CEO, Paul Jacobs. So can you please tell us a little bit about that long-standing collaboration?

With a lot of pleasure for sure. So we've learned Paul when he was running the Qualcomm mobile phone division and we did some car kits with them together at that time and explored with his technology and evangelized a little bit the automotive industry, explaining what at that time mobile phone features could mean in the future and obviously, also what connectivity could mean in the future. So we've started this engagement fairly early and then went to all the European car manufacturers. And with this and the -- obviously, the technology of Qualcomm at that time, we developed the first 3G automotive-graded module and developed it for the German car manufacturers to begin with and continued that later on with 4G and 4G advanced modules with the help of Qualcomm with all the features and technologies. And Paul was always a great supporter telling these industries what next will come and how the future will look like of connectivity.

I've had my share of experiences in the connected car world. I would tell you that automotive OEMs occasionally have a hard time clearly communicating their connectivity strategy. So how do you see satellite connectivity, in particular, playing a role here. What are some opportunities for early wins, but also opportunities for expansion and additional capability over the years?

Well, the eCall, as we just learned here, is always a use case, which everybody would like to have, and we have all the challenges in the mobile network right now where it's not always reachable. So this is the first demand and especially right now that mobile phones are offering an eCall capability more or less anytime, anywhere, the pressure in the automotive becomes more and more to at least adopt these kind of features. Obviously, continuing with capabilities of software over the air or any kind of additional features on top of just eCall, I think this gives the capability to enhance satellite communication there as well. Bandwidth may can be an issue, and I know that Globalstar has probably an answer to this as well because throughout the times, the telematics right now in automotive have been scaling through more and more features just besides just eCall because this is not where people would like to pay for. They need to pay for more service.

Certainly. I mean we have various technologies. We're already operating on the constellation, additional satellite constellation that we're planning for. So I mean we really think we're in a good position to address what automotive OEMs are going to be asking from us. On that point, automotive OEMs often require specific technologies, standards based. Can you tell us a little bit about how you see that from early engagements we've had with some German OEMs with your help?

Yes. So standardization is always a question. But on the other side, I think to pioneer things always start maybe without standardization. So we are currently in first proof of concepts with some German OEMs. So we started with a one-way module. And as the 2-way module will be available early next year, we'll continue to do that. And I think there's opportunities because at the end of the day, it's the customer experience they would like to give over. And especially that there are still a lot of white spots available around the world where a car or a mobile phone is not reachable. This kind of feature to say my car right now is available throughout the world, so to speak, is definitely something where they can explore maybe even beyond standardization.

Let's wrap up with a really simple question. Do you think automotive IoT is worth winning?

Yes. We actually -- we did -- we expanded the company from a little over EUR 50 million, EUR 60 million up to EUR 325 million when the families finally decided to sell it to a French Valeo, a large EUR 25 billion company. It starts. It's not easy to begin with automotive OEMs because they start most likely with high-end cars only, and you talk about a couple of hundred thousand devices. But when we finally ended up in full launch with both OEMs, we had for each probably 2.5 million to 3 million devices per year. So if it did become standard or commodity, it's a no-brainer, so to speak, to be part of it moving forward. And that's right now, when you look at telematics, I think it's in all cars and connectivity is something which is all around the world available.

I think it certainly requires commitment and long-term strategy.

You need longer breath sometimes because as you know, automotive guys think in 3-year time. So they probably start right now demanding NTN requirements in the specification for 2027 launches. But if you are in, it's probably an easy task.

Reinhard, thank you very much. We look forward to this partnership and accomplishing great things together.

All right. We're about to get started -- for those that are in the hallways, if you don't mind, making your way back, thank you very much. All right. For the next section, we'll be talking about government business segment. Traditionally, Globalstar hasn't done a great amount of work in the defense and government sector, but we're changing that very quickly. Last week, we announced a partnership we're incredibly excited about with Parsons. Parsons is a leading disruptive technology provider in the national security and global infrastructure markets with capabilities across cyber and intelligence, space and missile defense, transportation, environmental remediation, urban development and critical infrastructure protection. To tell you more about Parsons' Globalstar partnership as well as a larger set of opportunities in this market, I would like to invite to the stage, Mike Kushin, President of Parsons Defense and Intelligence division; and our own Paul Jacobs, CEO of Globalstar. Why don't you guys come over here?

All right. Thanks, Mike, for being here. It's been great getting to know you and glad that we can finally say who you are because we've been very quiet about who we were working within the defense space and so thanks for that. And so like Mersad said, we haven't done that much since the early days of the company in the defense sector. So maybe just start off by giving us a sense of what kind of use cases there are and how you see this playing out.

Yes, absolutely, Paul. First off, thanks for having me and hi, everybody. Glad I brought a toy since everybody else has a toy, I figured I'd bring one too. So we're very excited about the partnership with Globalstar that was announced recently. We've been working with them to put together some demos and technology disruptors for our business. So Parsons, we're about a $7 billion company. We do work all around the world. I run our defense and intelligence business, and that's the work that I've done pretty much my whole career. What we look to do is we look to find disruptive technologies that are going to be enduring in the defense space. We look to invest ahead of demand, meaning that when we see something that is a gap, not only for current capabilities or current operations, but for the future, we have conviction about making those investments and partnering with the right types of companies. And so when we came across Globalstar, we saw the opportunity to create really an incredible partnership, not only within my space, but the rest of the things that we do here at Parsons. The constellation, the spectrum, the bent pipe architecture, all of those technology aspects gives us numerous opportunities to bring the Globalstar capability into the defense industry and the different types of things that we do. So it's great timing. We believe that the new administration is going to be looking for some ready-made capabilities, and we have some of those things being worked on as we speak.

Yes. So you mentioned the bent pipe that we have in terms of creating opportunity to do new things. You have a software-defined radio platform. And maybe you can just talk a little bit about what that flexibility gives you in terms of addressing opportunities and sort of what technologies you're thinking about using?

Sure. Yes. So the space industry, not only in commercial, but in government is exploding. If you happen to follow this along, there's new organizations, the establishment of Spacecom and Starcom that kind of broke out from the Air Force several years ago and significant investment in government and defense in providing the ability to conduct operations and have capabilities. The bent pipe architecture and our ability to take our software-defined radio and capabilities, integrate at the gateways and then provide secure communications, resilience in places where there's RF interference, the ability to communicate in all steer areas is really sort of game changing. And we've been looking for this kind of capability for a little bit -- for a little while, and we looked at other vendors that are all doing great things for U.S. national security. But what we found was that the architecture, the spectrum, the ability to integrate quickly so that we could deal with events that are happening around the world, not only things that are going to be going on for a while, but the kind of things that sort of pop up gave us a unique ability to integrate with Globalstar's network and enterprise and constellation to provide those kind of solutions to government customers.

And obviously, we're here at an Investor Day. So people kind of interested in numbers and size of the opportunity and so forth. I mean, give us some sense of how you see the opportunity in terms of how big it can be, how valuable it can be?

Yes, absolutely. So again, we've established this initial partnership with Globalstar. We think 2025 is going to be really an explosion for us and an enduring capability for many years to come. We have these devices. I talked about my toy, right? It kind of looks bigger than what other people have. It has to be military hardened and military standard. So what this does is this allows us to communicate with the Globalstar constellation and be able to identify with a lot of precision where things are, the ability to communicate and different sorts of capabilities like that. So we anticipate being able to sell these in the millions. We're doing some additional miniaturization of this. And one of the things about providing technology to government customers is that you are oftentimes monitoring them. So you might be doing millions of these devices and capabilities in 2025 and 2026, for example. And then a couple of years later, you're replacing all of them because they need to be higher performance and need to be miniaturized and things like that. And the Globalstar infrastructure makes it very, very easy to do that. So we anticipate really explosive growth in 2025 and 2026. I will tell you, we did a recent demo here in the continental United States using this and the Globalstar architecture, operating at nearly [indiscernible] and the precision of where we were able to identify the location of that particular asset was pretty incredible. Can I say that?

Whatever. We're among friends here, and we're not webcasting. So obviously, the world is kind of an uncertain place right now, lots of things going on all over the world. And I just wondering if you maybe kind of give us a little tour of the hotspots and what the characteristics of them might be relative to the things that we might be supplying together.

Absolutely. So if you look at Europe, there's a lot of RF interference that goes on in certain places in Europe. And what that does is that impacts the ability to communicate the ability to have resilience of GPS and location services and things like that. If you look at Ukraine, for example, Ukraine is one of the top, I think, 3 exporters of grain in the world. So from a food security -- forget about everything else, from a food security perspective, the ability to provide safety and security for the ability to not only produce grain, but then get it exported out all around the world is pretty significant. The Middle East, just in the past week, there was a change in Syria. That creates a whole lot of uncertainty and that creates a need not only for U.S. national security, but for securities of and activities for foreign governments. And then as everybody, I'm sure knows, there's been a big effort across multiple administrations to focus on what's called the Indopacom AOR or the region out in the Pacific, and that sort of continues. So whether conflict is happening or there is an anticipation of conflict, it's really an enduring market. And this partnership that we're bringing with Globalstar is really going to create an enduring opportunity for many years to come.

Great. And then just there's a lot of companies out there providing connectivity solutions and just this partnership, we're super excited about it, but maybe just some comments on sort of what got you guys excited about working with us?

Yes, absolutely. As I mentioned earlier, Paul, we looked at other companies, and there are other companies that do great things for U.S. national security and national security around the world. But Globalstar is unique because of the spectrum, because of the bent pipe architecture, our ability to integrate our software capabilities into gateways with really high performance and being able to do it quickly because the world does change. I mean, a week ago, there was the change in the Middle East, right? So you have to be able to have that kind of quick reaction and the ability to put capabilities in place. And the Globalstar constellation has such coverage all around the world, it gives us the ability not only to do the hotspots that we know about today, but potential needs and capabilities kind of going on in the future. So we found Globalstar to be the obvious and only choice to partner with on the government and defense capabilities that we're doing for our customers.

Great. Well, we definitely appreciate the partnership, and I know you took the time to be here in person, and I really appreciate that and appreciate your friendship and look forward to working together for many years into the future. So thanks again for being here.

Thanks for having me, Paul.

Okay. So most of this information is coming from various 8-Ks that we filed as it relates to the partnership that we entered into a few years ago with our customer. But hopefully, a voiceover will help you guys understand what is a couple of pretty dense, dense documents. So hopefully, it's helpful. But after a multiyear development effort, multiyear testing effort, 2 years ago, we launched the world's first satellite direct to handset service with our customer. To effect this, we allocated 85% of current and future network capacity to support the service. And we did this initially utilizing the company's existing constellation, and then we're launching what we call the replacement satellites that will begin to provide service next year. And then finally, the extended MSS network that will be -- or that was subject to the 8-K that we announced earlier last month. So the new network will be owned by Globalstar Licensee LLC. It's an entity that we dubbed the Globalstar special purpose entity or the Globalstar SPE. This entity is very much a passive entity. It will simply hold the satellite assets. It will hold the global ground infrastructure assets as well as various licensing and spectrum to support the service. Importantly, SPE, I just want to make sure that this is very clear because it maybe got lost a bit in the 8-K, but the SPE will have no other business operations, will not have recognized revenue, no employees at that level and Globalstar Inc. ParentCo essentially, will continue to recognize all of the terrestrial revenue, legacy MSS revenue, the revenue derived from the customer arrangements as well as all ExCom revenue over time and this will be in place as the 85%-15% split on capacity remains in effect. So the structure of the agreements with customer involved various fees and payments. These include a recurring service fee and then a series of payments tied to operating expenses and CapEx to support the service as well as a series of bonus payments. And these bonus payments are really subject to our performance, whether it's achieving certain milestones as it relates to licensing requirements or service performance. So the bonus payments are variable. The rest are primarily fixed. Then central to how we funded the network build, we have a series of prepayments. And there is primarily two uses of capital. One, we used various prepayments to clean up our balance sheet, reduce our senior debt, really simplified our balance sheet extensively over the past couple of years. And then, of course, to fund the CapEx to construct the replacement satellites as well as the extended satellites that we announced last month. So the first prepayment we entered into in 2021, this fully paid down the company's [ Coface ] senior debt facility with the French banks. And then a portion of it was used to fund some ground CapEx a few years ago. So the total of this was $94.2 million. And the way all prepayments work, we're effectively crediting payments that we receive from our customer to reduce the payment over time concurrent with service delivery to the customer. As of September 30, the $94.2 million has been reduced to approximately $50 million, and then this will be fully defeased over the next 2 years. Then to support the construction and launch of the replacement satellites, again, these satellites that are set to go into service next year, we entered into a prepayment agreement. We dubbed the 2023 prepayment. The total CapEx is expected to be a little over $500 million for the replacement satellites to construct and launch them. And so the way that we structured this, half of that spend will be funded through the prepayment, so $252 million via the prepayment and the balance through Globalstar cash flow over time. This was really the optimal way to structure it to simplify the company's balance sheet, lower our cost of capital, significantly reduce our interest expense over time. And so I think ultimately, it was quite favorable compared to the other alternatives at the time. There's still about $100 million to draw of the $252 million, and then we expect that will be fully paid down by the year 2030. And then finally, we had a prepayment that was structured a little over a month ago. And that one is a little bit complicated, but it comes in 2 parts. One is $1.1 billion to fund or partially fund the new constellation for the extended MSS network. And then we also used $219 million prepayment funds to retire our 13% 2029 senior notes. So the combined $1.3 billion, like the other prepays will be reduced over time as we recognize service payments from customer. Then to fund what was a total $1.5 billion spend for the extended MSS network, we sold $400 million of a 20% minority interest in the Globalstar SPE. This was effectively 400,000 Class B units of that entity. So a quick illustration of our pro forma org structure for the deal. We will at the Globalstar Inc. level continue to retain 100% ownership of our international and domestic subs unrelated to the SPE. And then there's really no economic impact or ownership impact up at the Globalstar Inc. level. At the risk of repeating myself, but I think it's important, we want to make clear that Globalstar Inc. still retains all of the revenue tied to the customer relationship, all of the revenue tied to MSS as well as all terrestrial, including XCOM. The 20% stake sold to Apple, again, is selling a 20% interest in an entity that really has absolutely no operations. So there's going to be nothing but ground assets that are held in that entity, satellite assets that are held in that entity, other licensing and spectrum licensing. So in total, when you combine the $1.1 billion infrastructure prepayment plus the $219 million plus the $400 million for the minority interest, the total spend is approximately $1.7 billion. This amount is expected to be fully paid down. So we'll redeem the $219 million, pay back the $1.1 billion and fully redeem the $400 million within the design life of the satellites over time. Importantly, we have structured an agreement with Apple where to the extent we hit milestones to construct and launch the network on time, any of the interest that was associated with the $219 million 13% notes refinancing and then a small portion of the $1.1 billion prepay as long as we get the satellites up and get the ground infrastructure completed on time, our fees, which is essentially the cost of capital associated with those funds could go to 0. To the extent we're a little bit late, we could incur some fees, but it could be partially reduced and still have massive interest savings compared to what we would have incurred if we would have just left the 13% notes outstanding at a 13% cost of capital and then eventually refinance them. So as also disclosed in the 8-K from last month, we agreed to accelerate a series of $30 million annual payments. This will significantly bolster the company's balance sheet over time. And then probably most importantly, putting it all together, when we look at the long-term performance of the company and using 2024 as the baseline, the company expects more than double our revenue base in the first full year that the service is in effect and then do so with improved EBITDA margin. So effectively, EBITDA more than doubling as soon as we have the first year of service in place. But Rebecca will provide some more details on guidance.

For those of you who I do not know, I'm Rebecca Clary, I'm the CFO of Globalstar. By now, you have had a chance to digest our most recent earnings release last month, which showed strong financial performance in the third quarter and the year-to-date period. In our conversations with our investors and reading analyst coverage since then, we've heard very strong feedback on those results and strong support for our recent announcements and current trajectory. Certain questions about how and when we will execute on our key growth strategies and how the business will evolve in the future have helped frame today's agenda. So we do hope that the content and discussion have been well received and found valuable. Our financial structure has never been stronger. And today, I'm excited to recap for you the progress we have made as a company financially and to continue the discussion on our operational achievements and how our strategic initiatives will enable growth over the coming years. Before diving in, I just want to echo the enthusiasm that our entire team has for the future and reiterate the key themes from today. Paul discussed our strategic plan based on his vision for optimizing our core assets for our shareholders. Mersad and Alex discussed the 3 layers of value in our IoT area of our subscriber business from the one-way service we provide to our commercial resellers today to the 2-way technology on the road map and opportunities in the automotive industry and other dynamic verticals. Kyle and Tamer quite literally brought to life our terrestrial network assets, demonstrating various applications and opportunities for future growth. And Tim discussed the important service that we provide to our wholesale capacity customer supporting direct-to-device connectivity. It is clear that our future is bright, we are well capitalized, and have a plan in place to target growth through strategic investments, differentiated technology and market leadership. On the screen, you'll see our financial performance through September of 2024. During this period, we delivered revenue of $189 million for the first 9 months of 2024, translated this top line performance into strong profitability, generating $105 million of adjusted EBITDA. What I'd particularly like to highlight on this slide is adjusted EBITDA margin of 56% for the first 9 months, driven by operational efficiencies and the inherent leverage in our current business areas. As I'll discuss later in the presentation, we expect some margin compression in the near term, as we invest in a broader set of initiatives that we expect to fuel longer-term growth. Our balance sheet remains strong with $52 million of cash on hand. This healthy liquidity position supports both our organic growth initiatives and potential strategic opportunities. On the next slide, you'll see our growth over the last few years, beginning in 2021, which really was the inflection point for our company. During this period, we have built financial momentum and a strong foundation to deliver value to our shareholders. Our financial strategy has been, first, to achieve steady revenue growth; second, to leverage operating margin to improve profitability; and third, to grow free cash flow. From that inflection point in 2021 to 2023, we increased revenue at a CAGR of 34%, a strong data point that supports that we executed well on the first element of our financial strategy. The growth was driven by our wholesale capacity revenue, which is additive to our strong existing MSS business. It also reflects healthy market demand for our network assets and our ability to effectively monetize our infrastructure investments. Looking at full year trajectory, our 2024 revenue guidance range of $245 million to $250 million following the upward revision in November reflects our confidence to execute in the balance of the year. To put this forecast in perspective, it would represent a more than doubling of revenue from 2021. Turning to EBITDA. From 2021 to 2023, we increased adjusted EBITDA at a CAGR of 74%, growing from $39 million to $117 million. This growth reflects both our revenue expansion and our ability to achieve greater operating leverage as we scale usage of our satellite network assets. During the third quarter of 2024 alone, we delivered adjusted EBITDA of $43 million, representing year-over-year growth of 34%. In fact, adjusted EBITDA during the third quarter was higher than all of 2021. Based on this strong financial performance, we again raised our full year 2024 margin guidance in November to approximately 54%, demonstrating that we also executed well on the second element of our financial strategy, which was to leverage operating margin to improve profitability. Let's now turn to balance sheet and liquidity, where we've made substantial progress in strengthening our financial foundation. Looking at our operating cash flow performance, we increased this metric by more than 4x from 2020 -- sorry, from $22 million in 2020 to $99 million for the first 9 months of 2024. This increase highlights our growth and underscores the fundamental strength of our business model. Additionally, during the 2024 year-to-date period, our free cash flow, excluding reimbursable CapEx, was approximately $80 million, up from $8 million in 2020, reflecting our achievement of the final element of our financial strategy, which was to grow free cash flow. The down arrow on the right illustrates our successful deleveraging journey. We've reduced our net leverage ratio from 10x in 2020 to 3x in 2024, a significant improvement that reflects our disciplined approach to capital management and our expansion in the wholesale consumer market. This strengthened balance sheet provides us with enhanced financial flexibility as we move forward. Not captured in these leverage metrics is that we have refinanced our debt with, among other things, eliminating many of our restrictive covenants and decreasing our cost of capital, providing further flexibility to effectively run the business. Importantly, I would also like to remind you of our $1.8 billion global tax net operating loss carryforward. These are significant assets that we expect to offset much of our future taxable income over the coming years, thereby eliminating or reducing cash taxes paid during that period. Beyond our financial results, we are also taking steps intended to enhance our stock's liquidity and marketability and executing certain operational improvements. As you know, in November, we announced plans to uplist on the NASDAQ Global Select Market. This milestone represents a natural evolution for Globalstar and aligns with our strategic vision to increase our visibility within the investment community. We expect to begin trading on NASDAQ in the first quarter of 2025. In conjunction with transferring to the NASDAQ, we announced the intention to effect a reverse stock split, which serves multiple strategic purposes. This action realigns our outstanding shares to more normalized levels relative to our peers and optimizes our trading fundamentals through improved liquidity. Importantly, our post-split shares will meet additional institutional minimum stock price requirements, potentially broadening our investor base. We expect this reverse split to also be completed in the first quarter of 2025. On the operational front, we have expanded the expertise of our executive leadership team, including certain former Qualcomm executives and other talent that are some of the best that I've worked with in my career. As part of Paul coming on board initially, we licensed the intellectual property developed by XCOM that enables Globalstar to utilize the XCOM RAN technology on an exclusive and perpetual basis. In this arrangement, we have rights to any revenue generated from utilization of the assets as well as access to XCOM's resources. We have been paying for these resources in stock since last year. However, given our current and forecasted liquidity position, we expect to soon transition these resources to the Globalstar employees. In addition to minimizing unnecessary dilution, we expect this transition to result in a more synergistic organization. Other strategic operational changes during the year include the addition of new channel partners, extending our sales team's geographic reach, as you've heard today, and the successful transition of the manufacturing of our core MSS products to a facility in Vietnam, a strategic move that not only optimizes our operational footprint, but also potentially mitigates future tariff impacts. Collectively, these operational improvements reflect our commitment to driving sustainable growth and operational excellence. As previously discussed, we have built financial momentum and a strong foundation to deliver value to our shareholders and invest in strategic growth initiatives. These investments in new revenue-generating services are expected to result in modest margin compression in the short term, but we intend to be disciplined in our investments and generate a return in the near term. This slide shows an illustration intended to qualitatively show the scale of these investments to each related opportunity for each of our key growth areas. Note that we didn't focus on TAM for this purpose, but instead the specific market opportunity that we can address. For example, for Band 53, we intend to monetize this asset through a leasing model, which does not require a large infrastructure investment. Instead, the cost is primarily in business development resources and licensing fees, which are generally minimal compared to the relative revenue opportunity. For MSS capacity utilization, since upfront network costs are largely funded under our wholesale capacity arrangement, the contribution margin is high on the incremental revenue generated from our 15% of network capacity. All in all, the takeaway is that our expected incremental spending in the near term positions us well to drive long-term shareholder value. Now turning to our forecast. We believe that these forecasts underscore several key themes: our ability to consistently deliver strong top line growth while maintaining healthy margins, our disciplined approach to balancing growth investments, and confidence in the expanding market opportunities ahead of us. For 2024, as previously mentioned, we are affirming our outlook provided on the third quarter earnings call, with total revenue expected between $245 million to $250 million and adjusted EBITDA margin of approximately 54%, implying adjusted EBITDA of $132 million to $135 million. This outlook reflects an increase in the low end of our initial 2024 revenue guidance, which was $225 million. demonstrating the momentum in our business during the year, momentum which has us potentially ending 2024 with revenue at or near the original 2026 guidance that we issued at our Investor Day in 2022. Looking ahead to 2025, we're introducing a forecast that demonstrates continued sustainable growth with revenue expected to be between $260 million and $285 million, representing 10% year-over-year growth at the midpoint, and an adjusted EBITDA margin around 50%, reflecting an expected short-term compression in margin following the critical investments that we reviewed earlier. Longer term, and as previously discussed and restated by Tim, we expect revenue to double 2024 amounts during the first full year of service provided over the extended MSS network and generate robust margins in excess of 54%. This forecast excludes certain key growth opportunities that are too binary to forecast with precision, such as large terrestrial spectrum and XCOM RAN deployments. Before transitioning to Q&A, I want to emphasize that these targets reflect a thorough analysis of our market position, growth drivers and operational capabilities. We believe we have the right strategy and execution capability to deliver on these commitments, while creating sustainable long-term shareholder value. With that, we will wrap up today's presentation with a Q&A session.

First, on the Band 53 licensing. When you think about the MNOs, in some cases, they have to put up new antennas. In other cases, there's modules. In some cases, they get spectrum and they can flip a switch. In the case of 53, when you think of the 3 MNOs and just starting with the U.S., what's the case? I assume no new antennas, but would they have to get new modules within the existing infrastructure or just some of them like T-Mobile, I would think, given the proximity, just flip a switch and get access to that capacity. And then, if you do get a licensing deal in the U.S., do the 12 countries potentially expand more because people look to the U.S. as a leader and you open up the opportunity for terrestrial licensing?

Yes. Kyle, do you want to...

Yes. So as far as the infrastructure, if someone is going to deploy Band 53, we assume that they would want to deploy new Band 53 infrastructure. There may be opportunities, as you mentioned, with T-Mobile because they have Band 41. Maybe there are some ways to do things that Paul can speak to more. But I would expect you would need new infrastructure and you would need new modules. So there would be a CapEx cycle, which is pretty much the same for pretty much any spectrum. I mean, the carriers aren't going out and speculatively building radios with bands that they're not using. And then as far as like if we were to get a deal -- a licensing deal for Band 53, we would definitely go out and get more countries. We're at 12 now. I think we could add -- we're still working on a few, but we're really focused at this point on delivering those proof points, showing the world that this is an asset that's going to be deployed and have us start generating cash from it, and then we will go and continue to add other countries after that.

And what happens if an MNO licenses on a nationwide basis? You showed some applications up here where people were implementing Band 53 in a private network. Can it still be used in a public WAN and not cut off the ability for it to be integrated into XCOM RAN?

Yes. I would say like if that were to happen, then most likely take the Port of L.A. that were deployed with Nokia, and say, carrier XYZ buys us or leases the spectrum on a nationwide basis, then the Port of L.A. would just become a customer of Carrier XYZ that did the licensing deal. So I think that they could still -- I mean, they would be happy to have that customer. The carriers are out trying to get those types of opportunities now.

And then just one other on XCOM RAN. Are MNOs potentially a partner? I mean, you showed a quadrupling of capacity. So is there an opportunity to go to a large MNO, say, do Times Square, we need capacity there, sell them, assuming that they've got RAN installed, with a software upgrade? Or is the market opportunity more the cable operators or private networks, I think, as you previously -- if you can just kind of size the probabilities of maybe getting large customers like that to do it in population dense areas?

Yes. I think it's this issue of building out the full feature set. So we are going sort of use case by use case in the private network to pay for the bootstrapping of a complete thing because, as you know, there's a lot of companies that have tried to build sort of a complete new RAN and they're all having financial difficulties with that. So we need to get there. That will take a little bit of a journey. But I think the potential use case for full mobile use of it -- yes, for sure, hotspots, I think, are super interesting. We have had conversations about hanging these things on cables and so forth. So I don't think there's a restriction. And in fact, some of the deployments are interesting because what we do is we do joint processing, so we bring back a lot of radios to a centralized location. And some of the deployments are of that type with certain operators. So I think there might be sort of a bias towards those particular operators that are doing that. I don't know. Tim, do you have any other comments you want to add?

I think you covered it. So it's definitely -- the technology in itself can be in any spectrum, including the MNOs. The architecture of the MNO deployment needs to be this O-RAN architecture. So for example, you guys know DISH is O-RAN, some also in Asia specifically. But other than that, there is no any technical reason why this can be for hotspot and applications like that.

If we can start on the extended MSS, I understand that you couldn't give us more than the 8-K today, but is there going to be a point in the future that you'll give us a little bit more on timing and expectations? Obviously, that's a really interesting opportunity. But if it's 3 years away, like a typical build cycle, or 7 years away, or whatever. So should we expect, in the next few months, maybe as you contract with a vendor for construction that we will get more?

I think that generally, as you've seen for the past number of years, we're very, very cautious about the information that we disclosed on that front. But we do have very strict SEC disclosure obligations. And as we move forward with launch and construction contracts, the amount that we're spending and committing to will, of course, need to be disclosed. I think that's really the best way to track the progress, but we're not going to be saying any more than we need to over time.

Understood. And Rebecca, in your comments, you talked about the balance sheet improving, and then you said potential strategic opportunities. Was that organic within the company? Or is the company thinking maybe about the ability to pursue M&A in organic capabilities?

I think we're always thinking about ways to improve the business, right? And I think it's predominantly more the former part of your question, right? So not necessarily M&A. But again, if it makes sense, we're going to consider all those options.

Just investing money like you're doing next year...

In all of those kind of revenue streams and revenue potential areas that you've heard today.

Right. And there's a big elephant in the room, Starlink, that I don't think has come up here today. And obviously, they play really in the broadband space today, but they have an IoT strategy, and they're certainly making a lot of noise there. They have the partnerships with the carriers, particularly T-Mobile right now. So how should we think about the potential threat from Starlink and from Kuiper partnering with terrestrial carriers and how that impacts your competitive position over time?

I think we've definitely spent a lot of time understanding where there is value in the market and the kinds of things that we have to build to extract that value. And so the technology is set up to be quite simple and cost effective to implement, whereas as all of us who have been involved in standards bodies for some time, the standards tend to be quite complex. And so for the use cases that we're working on, there's a lot of overhead associated with those. So we believe that we can be more cost-sized, power effective for certain IoT applications and those are the applications that we're quite focused on. The other issue is just the cost of constellation. It's a large complex constellation that they're building. They need MNO spectrum. It's going to be a patchwork of spectrum. So if you're adding multiple bands or multiple SKUs to deal with different frequency bands, that also adds a lot of difficulty. And then the question is what is paying for that constellation over time. They have relatively short lifespans of the satellites, mobile broadband doesn't pay because people don't want to pay extra for that, then where is that cost coming from to support that. And by the way, it's not just a satellite constellation, because a cost that people aren't thinking about is the operator's cost. The spectrum that an operator might allocate is quite expensive just to have acquired. And then when you do a build-out, now you've added that much more capital expenditure into supporting that spectrum. So the opportunity cost for a mobile operator to allocate spectrum, if it's not generating real revenue or real benefit is quite difficult. And as I outlined earlier, we know what the business case is from the handset manufacturers side. We do not yet know what that case is from the mobile network operator's side.

My question is with respect to the extended MSS constellation. Is this constellation going to be based upon 1 of the 2 license filings that you made in Germany in 2022 or France in August of 2020. And with respect to Globalstar SPE, and you mentioned the spectrum for this extended satellite constellation will be contained in that subsidiary. Does that imply that the new extended MSS constellation is going to be using spectrum that is additional spectrum rather than your existing spectrum holdings?

Let me hit the second question first. No, the extended MSS network will be on our existing L, S, and C-band. So they won't rely on any external spectrum. But as it relates to the filings, companies make filings all the time with the ITU, with various administrations. You can look at other operators, and they can hold sometimes a few or even more than 10 that they will put in place, hold for a period of time, gives them some option value, maybe even some trade date over time. I don't think we have confirmed -- I know that we haven't confirmed what licensing regime we're going to follow or the administration that we're going to flow through. I think that in the relative near term, that will become clear, but that is yet to be disclosed.

Paul, on the Band 53, you, I thought, were fairly clear in that we had limited people that cared at 11 megahertz. And now we are offering XCOM in addition to that. Can you just walk through the dynamics of how many more people are now interested in talking? And I'm just curious, in general, how the pitch is going?

I'll let Kyle also talk to that. But -- so there's the piece that's the private network aspect of it and this notion that we can provide mission-critical connectivity with it. That is definitely getting traction. Partners that we're talking to on the private network side recognize that, yes, CBRS is out there, but CBRS hasn't -- it isn't fully mission-critical. And when I say -- why I keep hyping -- or harping on that is that if you don't have a mission-critical application, you're going to use Wi-Fi. I mean, it's -- so when you go to private cellular, it's because you have something that you really need reliability on. But now you see with CBRS that it can go away. So it is more reliable, but maybe not quite as reliable as you'd want. And that's why the n53 really is the thing that's been of interest. So that, we are definitely getting additional interest. On the other side, using the XCOM technology to expand the throughput, so that instead of getting the -- what you get through traditional 10 megahertz or 11, you'd get, as you saw, 4x, 5x and beyond, I think there is a lot of interest in that. But breaking into, for example, the mobile network operator space takes some period of time for them to go through their testing in the network and so on and so forth. So it's not the thing that we're -- like we're starting the discussions, but I don't expect that, that will come to fruition immediately, both because of their testing and because of our implementation of the new feature sets. I don't know, Kyle, maybe...

Yes. The only other thing I would add to that is I wouldn't characterize it as there wasn't interest and then now there is because we have XCOM RAN. I mean XCOM RAN is a great benefit to Band 53 because it makes it perform so much more. I mean it's kind of amazing that the large retail customer, we can do -- we can satisfy their entire needs using our 10 megahertz band over XCOM RAN, but we do have carrier aggregation with CBRS and 5 gigahertz. That's a lot of spectrum brought together. And I think it's a very interesting use case. We are working with all of those people, in that milestones slide that we had, and others and bringing the spectrum to market. I think the reality is, naively, I thought, we've gone through this in the past, but we went through the FCC process. We thought we could sell -- we would just sell the spectrum. That didn't happen. And we had to keep overcoming these hurdles. But when you go back and look at the CTIA report that I can share with you that Mersad sent to me, basically, every band has taken 10 years to mature and then be able to be deployed on a wide basis. And so that makes me feel a little bit better that it's taken this long. But I think the reality -- like we've done all the work, like now we have an ecosystem very soon that you can easily deploy. So I think the conversations will be different, like the things that Deborah is doing with Hawk Networks, there's lots of users that would love to have a spectrum band. But like Globalstar, in a lot of cases, they're even smaller than us, they're not going to go out and create the ecosystem. And so we had to do that, and we've done that, and I think the timing is now.

Yes. I think the lesson that you have to drive the ecosystem is true. And we had to do that even in the sites of Qualcomm. And here, it's the same thing. We had to have something to show what the value of that asset was to people and we're in the process of doing that.

I, for one, found the Parsons conversation quite interesting and perhaps fairly significant. I don't have a sense of the timing. Can you just walk through, particularly with the new administration coming in looking for new opportunities, when does it start to be something Rebecca is paying a lot of attention to?

So we're in the middle of a proof of concept right now. We did it -- as Mike said, we've done testing already and demonstrations in the United States. As there are these other hotspots in the world, there's interest in doing proof of concept there, particularly because of the congested RF environment. It's a good place to do it. We have a good frequency band to do it in. So that's happening over the next order of months. And then we'll know sort of the commercial -- the initial commercial availability will happen. So we expect it to happen in the next year.

You were on a panel recently talking about this concept of unified communication crossing private to MSS. Can you talk about that maybe relative to the global retailer that you've been working with? And it sounds like you've had some early successes on site? Do the comments around unified communication thread into that test? And if so, can you kind of give -- maybe give us a little bit of an update on use cases and how that might be expanding from the original RFP?

So that is actually an aspirational thing for us over time. I wouldn't say that we are -- because there's a lot of software that will go along with it. And so the partnership that we'll do to build all of that out is still in the future. We're actually building out and proving out the capabilities today. It's just what I was saying on that panel is that we have all of the assets to put together a complete supply chain visibility. And I think that that's valuable. It's going -- we're going to learn a lot of the things that we don't know today, and we're going to work with partners. I mean, obviously, some of us have a lot of experience in supply chain, stuff from OmniTRACS at Qualcomm. So it's not like we're coming at it from first principles, but we do -- that is an opportunity for us into the future, but I wouldn't say it's not -- if you look at our investments right now, that is not something that we're putting a lot of money into today, because we want to build the core capabilities first. I would say on the MSS side, though, we are looking at how we continue to evolve the technology. So we're talking about the 2-way now, but we're looking at other ways, other technologies that we can use to get even better applicability of the system to that kind of an application. And I don't really want to say much more than that, but we're definitely trying to innovate in this space as well.

If I can have a follow-up, a question with respect to the XCOM stuff, is, Globalstar came from terrestrial-based CDMA technology that then got applied to satellite. Could you do the same thing with the XCOM technology terrestrially with launching thousands of satellites to do an outer space with what you're doing terrestrially, just like you did with CDMA going into outer space.

Do you want to talk to it?

Well, actually this has been the question I'm getting since I moved to Globalstar. I mean, in principle, some parts of it can be applied, especially at maybe low level, not necessarily all the way to satellite, but like something in the stratosphere or whatever. Not that we don't believe it can work even for higher, in LEO, but it at least would be our first trial if we were to do something like that. I have just to clarify that this is a change in architecture still. We have to do a change in architecture, and we have to do a lot of testing and design for it. So I'm just looking on the conceptual level. It is something that we have been thinking about, but nothing really at the moment happening there.

I don't know if it's too technical, but one of the things that makes them all work is that we built a way of synchronizing the base stations, even though they are separated in distance. So you might think of like a massive MIMO panel. It's fairly easy to synchronize them. You have to do something akin to that here, in fact, even more carefully. And some of the magic is in how you do that synchronization. If you think about taking it up in the space, it's hard to do that. So there's some technology that would have to be developed in order to make that happen, which would be a reasonable investment.

Well, Elon seems to be doing some very interesting things in the outer space with his laser ISLs and just thinking that your base stations here are interlinked by -- you said fiber optic cables, which implies lasers. So lasers through glass, lasers through outer space, same thing.

A couple of questions. On 17 and 26 satellites that have been ordered, is there a time line for deciding on the optional 9 satellites? Is that something that you've foregone? Or is that still kind of off in the future?

So the option for 9 -- we've ordered 17 firm. The first launch will take place next year. The option has not run out. We have not committed to that. I think most likely, I think the baseline should be that we're going to move forward with 17, but we have a number of years to make that decision. And if we have the demand capacity after we launch 17, the demand outstrips capacity, we can absolutely launch that and have that up in space pretty quickly.

And then I know the EMSS, the extended MSS, is still something pretty tight lipped, but if it's $500 million for 17 satellites, is it fair to assume 54 satellites for $1.5 billion? Or is that not how it works out?

We've disclosed what the total CapEx spend is, which is the $1.5 billion, which includes the ground construction, satellite construction, launch and all the ancillary elements to construct the network. And that's as specific as we've gotten so far.

Okay. And then just my last one is, I know that Globalstar has been pretty, I guess, conservative on the direct-to-device opportunity. I'm curious how you see the services that Globalstar can provide, evolving both with the 17 satellites that are under construction now. I guess going from the current satellites to the replacement satellites to the EMSS, do you add more features and maybe get closer to adding features beyond text with later generation satellites?

Yes. So there are things that we can do in our 15% based off of sort of the advancement of technology. We can't be very precise about that at this point in time, but there are definitely things that the team is thinking about in terms of innovation there. When it comes to a customer, obviously, we can't comment on them, and they are one of the best companies in the world at bringing new technology to market. So we will see what they do, and we'll sometimes be as surprised as you.

Okay. So a question on the 17 that you've ordered. As I understand, you've contracted for one launch of 8 or 9. Are the rest contracted for launch? Are they going to go from one rocket or more than one rocket, on what time scales?

So we have contracted to construct the first 17 and to launch the initial batch next year. The worst thing you can do is waste the lifetime of the satellites and space without needing to utilize them as their replacement satellites. We need to see how the performance of the current generation satellites degrade or sustain over time. So we're going to hold them as an option. You sustain the useful life of the satellites as they're held in storage -- cold storage on the ground. And to the extent we need them at some point over the next couple of years, we can contract quickly for a launch with a few launch providers and get them up relatively quickly to fulfill their service. But for some period of time, they're going to be held on the ground and maintain life.

And separately, on the Band 53, when it's used with a private network? I mean, megahertz POPs don't make much sense in a Port of L.A. Is the model for monetizing the spectrum in that case, something like CBRS, where you charge some fee per device per month? Or how do you evaluate the value of spectrum in that application?

Yes. I don't think that it will -- I don't think we'll do device per month, but conceptually something similar to that. I agree, it's not -- we use dollar per megahertz POP just because everybody uses it, and I think it's a benchmark. And like I said on the slide, I mean, basically, we're looking at that and saying, okay, what type of cash flow would we need to generate across the United States to justify where the spectrum would be if we were to go and license it to Charter or Comcast or Verizon. And so it's just a tool that we use to kind of frame how we're thinking about where it should be valued. And there are going to be cases that I don't -- I mean it's not just private network. I mean some of the things that Deborah is working on right now are definitely not kind of private network in the normal sense. And one of the things that she said, which I think is a very exciting area, is like there is this kind of convergence of public and private networks, and it's going to get a little blurry. I mean, just today, like I'm on Band 53 and here on my phone and I'm doing everything, and then I could just as easily roam to AT&T when I leave. And so I think you're going to see more and more of that type of network -- kind of hybrid network as we have more of these autonomous situations and the need for very dense high capacity performance at specific locations, but then you can just roam on to the other carriers. And it's hard for the carriers to justify the CapEx to do a lot of this stuff. So it's going to be a different model.

There's some upcharge or some that you don't necessarily break out when you sell an XCOM RAN with Band 53 as opposed to just one?

Yes, we would add additional -- if in the case of we're selling XCOM RAN, there would be the XCOM RAN hardware, service fee, and the spectrum fee would be on top of that. Maybe we end up lumping it into the service fee, but it will be an additional cost.

And you look at the dollar per megahertz POP also just as a general way of assessing value. And I would say that before we did the XCOM deal, we kind of thought about that aspect of, hey, if we can make something 5x or 10x more efficient, is that equivalent to a 10 megahertz chunk looking like 50 or 100 megahertz. Now you obviously don't expect to get all of that value creation in a dollar per megahertz POP on this virtual way. But you do recognize that we are creating more value that way. And at some point, we will be able to recognize the fact that there is that increased value if you think of a virtual dollar or dollars per virtual megahertz.

If you wind up licensing spectrum, how does the physical deliverable that Globalstar provides change over time? Are you still in the hardware business, in the hardware business in an even bigger way because it's going to be a more scalable, more higher volume opportunity? Or do you let the ecosystem basically handle all that stuff and you just become a license -- a toll taker much like the Qualcomm IP business?

I mean Qualcomm evolved over time. We started out being an operator, manufacturer of infrastructure, manufacturer of handsets, chips. I mean we did kind of everything. And then we ended up deciding what was the most valuable parts of it. And when I was running the handset business and we'd come up with some innovation, we'd quickly give it to Samsung and LG and everybody else. So I think I've been on that journey of like finding where the highest value is, and we'll continue on that kind of a journey. I think one of the things that we did here with XCOM RAN was we really took a very sharp group of wireless engineers to figure out what the next new thing was going to be. And we always did have to do that at Qualcomm, too. So I think that evolution trying to lead the market is probably something we're going to continue to do. But then I do think, as time goes on, we will probably provide access to that to others. And even today, the team is helping some of the other infrastructure vendors figure out how to do some of the things that they figured out how to do just because we want to grow the pie around n53.

A follow-up. Can the XCOM RAN technology be applied to other spectrum? Make someone else's spectrum that much more bandwidth, more capacity? Has -- are there any initiatives to go out and try and -- is there a reason why a cellular Verizon or AT&T or whoever would want to deploy that technology within their network to enhance capacity without having to put in more CapEx?

Yes. So it can run on any sub-7 gigahertz spectrum it will run on. It's open RAN based. So we can easily swap out different frequency bands and so forth. And the stuff that we've built has little daughter cards to add bands and so forth. So yes, it's entirely possible. In fact, we've done it in other cases. I think that hotspots are definitely an interesting application. There's also kind of this thing about being able to put the radios wherever you want. You can really tailor -- in a macro network, you can tailor the handoff regions quite well, because you can imagine I can just kind of make it in a regular shape instead of just dealing with what physics gives me from a single location. So those are all interesting things for an operator. As I said earlier, though, you've got to go through their process. They want to start you out in a certain area. They're going to run you through the labs for a long time. So we know kind of the cadence of all that stuff, and we're trying to sort of intercept the timing as well as we can.

Paul, you guys did an excellent job today really showing the value of all the assets you have here. And we're talking about the dollar value megahertz costs and things. I'm just curious, for you, as you've invested your reputation, your experience, your hard work, how you thought about it when you negotiated your contract, and particularly the options. What was the framework, the metrics? What were the things that made you jump on board and actually accept that the package, the compensation package you took?

Yes. I mean I felt like the company was undervalued and that there was an opportunity to create value. And so that's why we structured the comp package the way that we did. It's really stock price-based. And I believe that there was a great platform here, which has been validated. A satellite company is a tough thing in general, because you have this big CapEx to keep the constellation going, but this company solved that problem. And so that really made me think, okay, we can do a lot in terms of innovating. The team and I, that's what we've done together for 30 years, some of us. And the structure of the things that I described earlier about how the system allows you to do new innovation, and then the fact that we have this terrestrial spectrum asset that we could now apply new technology to, all those things seem like a great opportunity to create value. And it's also, I would say, quite fun to be in the middle of some of the hottest discussions in the industry. I mean, everybody -- once Globalstar and our customer did what we did, like everybody got interested in it. And that's a fun place to be, too. So we can shape the future there. There's lots of strategic things you can think about doing and lots of connections that I have and the team has that we can bring to bear. So it seems like a lot better than sitting on the couch watching TV.

I thought you were going to say hottest people when you said hottest. It's nice.

Sorry. It's a good group, by the way. I should have said that, too. It's a great team and the culture is excellent. the way Jay is over here in the corner being quiet, but he helps set an excellent culture.

Once the Band 53 leases get executed, the cash is going to start to pile up. What's the best use of that cash? We talked about M&A possibility. What about a dividend, stock buyback? Are there still any covenants to restrict a dividend or a stock buyback? And also, there seems to be, I think, 200 million approximate more shares that can be issued. Can there be a strategic plan for those shares at some point?

We do have restrictions in our existing agreements around cash payments to our shareholders. So that would eliminate a dividend and a share buyback at this point. It really hasn't been the focus for us. But to the extent that our balance sheet continues to improve and gets healthier, maybe that's something that we bring up and try to negotiate that. But currently, we are restricted, and it's not on our short-term radar. Sorry, your second question?

Isn't there 200 more million shares that could be issued? And if so, can there be a strategic plan for those shares?

There could be for sure. I mean one of the reasons why we are in a position where a reverse is in the near term in terms of the first quarter is because of the dilution that we've experienced over the last several years, right, when we were not strong financially, and we had to use stock as a method of consideration. And so we're certainly not looking to do something dilutive right now by issuing a lot of shares, but we understand the availability that we have. Maybe one more? Maybe last one.

I was just curious, you talked about the other satellites beyond 17. And I'm curious if the motivation for that would be greater capacity from your existing customer in terms of what they're doing? Or is it more likely that there'll be another customer that will come in and ask you to launch satellites for a service that is distinct from Apple?

You can tell that the funding for the extended MSS network is coming from our customer. So it's really driven by their demands, their excitement for the future for their services. I would not expect another large party to come in and try to have an overlapping network with overlapping services and spectrum band. So we're focused on our 15% capacity and doing our best to deliver the best service for our customer.

And then also using the terrestrial authorizations as well. So that's where you could maybe see some large partner. All right. Well, I think we are out of time, but I wanted to say thanks to everyone for being here. I especially want to say thank you to our partners who came and shared the stage with us today, and some of you came from very long distances, so thank you so much for doing it. I think one of the other things that you got out of today was a chance to just see the set of executives, both the newer executives that have come in the last year and the team that's been here and got Globalstar to the point it is a strong position that it is today. I said this morning that I was excited by what we've done and what the opportunities are. I think we're executing very well operationally. I think that is showing up in the financial results. And I hope if you haven't in the past been following us that closely, you can see all the announcements we're making, the things that are happening. And you can see -- if you have been following us for a long time, you can see that we've come a long way. So we are financially strong. We have a lot of exciting assets coming online in the coming years. We expect to be able to use those to generate new and growing revenue streams. We are the partner of choice to some of the world's biggest and most demanding companies, and we want to be your investment of choice. So thank you very much for coming, and happy holidays to everybody.