Globalstar, Inc. (GSAT) Q4 FY2025 Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, and thank you for standing. Welcome to the Globalstar Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Rebecca Clary, CFO. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. Before we begin, please note that today's call contains forward-looking statements intended to fall within the safe harbor provided under the securities laws. Factors that could cause the results to differ materially are described in the Risk Factors section of Globalstar's SEC filings, including its most recent annual report on Form 10-K and its other SEC filings as well as today's earnings release. Also note that management may reference EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA, free cash flow or adjusted free cash flow on this call, which are financial measures not recognized under U.S. GAAP. As required by SEC rules and regulations, these non-GAAP financial measures are reconciled to their most comparable GAAP financial measures in the earnings release, which is available on our website. Today, I will walk through our fourth quarter and full year 2025 financial results, then discuss liquidity and our 2026 guidance. Starting with the full year. Total revenue reached a record $273 million, a 9% increase over 2024 and in line with our guidance. This marks our fourth consecutive year of record revenue. Service revenue was $257.3 million, up 8%, driven primarily by increased wholesale capacity services. Subscriber equipment revenue was $15.7 million, up 24%, reflecting a higher volume of commercial IoT device sales. Turning to profitability. We generated income from operations of $7.4 million compared to a loss of $0.9 million in 2024. This improvement was due to higher revenue, as previously discussed, partially offset by increased operating expenses, including personnel costs to support our next-generation infrastructure build-out, continued investment in XCOM RAN development and higher legal and professional fees. During the year, operating expenses benefited from $3.9 million in employee retention credits received under the CARES Act, which were allocated between cost of services and MG&A. Net loss improved to $7.6 million from $63.2 million in 2024. This improvement was due primarily to the prior year, reflecting a nonrecurring, noncash loss on extinguishment of debt related to the paydown of the 2023 13% notes. We also benefited from favorable foreign currency remeasurement on intercompany balances and noncash gains on the quarterly mark-to-market adjustment of our derivative asset. These items were partially offset by higher noncash imputed interest related to the 2024 prepayment agreement. Adjusted EBITDA reached a record $136.1 million, representing a 50% margin, in line with our guidance. This increase over 2024 reflects higher revenue, partially offset by higher operating expenses, primarily due to investment and growth opportunities. Specifically, while we continue to enhance and develop our XCOM RAN product and service offerings, we incur costs in advance of revenue. Turning to Q4. Total revenue was $72 million, including $67.4 million of service revenue and $4.6 million from equipment sales. Service revenue increased 17% and equipment revenue increased 31% compared to Q4 2024. The revenue increase was driven primarily by wholesale capacity services, including performance bonuses earned in the quarter and additional service fees associated with network cost reimbursement. We also saw contributions from growth in commercial IoT subscribers and device sales and revenue under our agreement with Parsons, partially offset by Duplex and SPOT subscriber churn and lower XCOM RAN sales. Q4 loss from operations was $0.4 million, a meaningful improvement from a $4.2 million loss from operations in Q4 2024. I'd also note that cost of subscriber equipment sales included a $1.1 million charge related to tariffs on equipment imported and then reexported to foreign subsidiaries, where previously recorded duty drawbacks are no longer deemed probable of recovery. Q4 net loss was $10.6 million compared to $50.2 million in the prior year, with the improvement largely attributable to the same noncash activity that impacted the full year period. Q4 adjusted EBITDA was $32.4 million, up 7% from the prior year's quarter. Turning to the balance sheet. We ended the year with $447.5 million in cash and cash equivalents, up from $391.2 million at year-end 2024. Operating cash flows during 2025 were $621.7 million, which included $430.6 million received in connection with the infrastructure prepayment. Capital expenditures were $550.4 million, primarily related to our commitments under the updated services agreement for the deployment of the replacement satellites as well as the extended MSS network, which includes a new satellite constellation, expanded ground infrastructure and increased global MSS licensing. Adjusted free cash flow for the year was $171.5 million, up from $131.9 million in 2024. 2025 benefited from $45 million in accelerated service payments and higher ongoing service fees, partially offset by increased operating costs. Our principal debt balance was $410 million at year-end, down modestly from $417.5 million at the end of 2024, reflecting scheduled recoupments of $34.6 million under the 2021 funding agreement, partially offset by $27.1 million in new issuance under the 2023 funding agreement. Looking ahead to 2026, we expect total revenue between $280 million and $305 million, with an adjusted EBITDA margin of approximately 50%. This outlook reflects our confidence in the continued growth trajectory of the business as we scale our next-generation infrastructure and expand our commercial opportunities. With that, I'll turn the call over to Paul.

Thanks, Rebecca, and good morning, everyone. It's great to be with you today, and I appreciate everyone joining us for our fourth quarter and full year 2025 update. 2025 was a transformational year for Globalstar. We closed the year with record full year revenue of $273 million, representing a 9% increase year-over-year and delivered an adjusted EBITDA margin of 50%. These results reflect strong execution, operating discipline and continued progress across every major dimension of our business. Throughout the year, we focused on scaling the core business while laying the foundation for our next phase of growth, and we believe our financial performance clearly reflects that balanced approach. From a strategic perspective, we made meaningful advances across product innovation, infrastructure expansion, regulatory progress and market diversification. One of the most important milestones during the year was the launch of two-way satellite IoT capabilities and the completion of the commercial rollout of our RM200M module. This represents a significant expansion of our IoT portfolio, moving beyond one-way monitoring to enable reliable command and control for enterprise, government and industrial customers. Two-way IoT meaningfully expands our addressable market, strengthens our partner-led go-to-market model and enables higher-value use cases where resilience, reliability and confirmation are mission-critical. At the same time, we continue to accelerate diversification across end markets. During 2025, we secured early government and defense wins, expanded our presence in agriculture, wildfire response, industrial IoT and public safety and built momentum across multiple verticals. This diversification strategy is intentional and increasingly important as it reduces reliance on any single market while positioning Globalstar to serve a broad range of customers with complex connectivity requirements. In the government and defense sector specifically, we achieved several important milestones. With our partner, Parsons, we completed a successful proof of concept, began customer trials and are expanding our relationship to include private 5G solutions for the federal market. We also completed and are continuing to invest in XCOM RAN-based 5G research to evaluate high-capacity private wireless architectures for defense applications. Additionally, we are also pleased to highlight a recent development validating the strength of our broader connectivity platform, Virewirx, which was formerly XCOM Labs, was awarded a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research contract worth $1.9 million from the Office of the Under Secretary of War to develop an advanced 5G system for challenging RF environments. As part of that effort, Virewirx selected Globalstar as a technology partner, leveraging our XCOM RAN Private 5G platform. This collaboration underscores the growing relevance of our technology beyond traditional satellite services and reflects the confidence in our ability to support mission-critical communication solutions. The initiatives reinforce the relevance of our architecture for defense and government use cases and demonstrate growing confidence in our ability to support high-priority mission requirements. Taken together, we believe these efforts are a meaningful expansion of our government and defense footprint, and we expect this area to become an increasingly important contributor to our business over time. More broadly, we continue to see steady demand for our products and services, with new customers and emerging use cases coming online as we execute against a clearly defined go-to-market strategy focused on scalable long-term growth. That growth is underpinned by our continued investment in our infrastructure. During the year, we made significant progress expanding our global ground station network across multiple continents. We believe these investments will strengthen capacity, improve redundancy, and enhance readiness for our next-generation services, including our C-3 constellation. In parallel, we advanced our ITU financial commitments, completing 50% of the investment we pledged. These efforts are foundational and are expected to prepare our network to support future satellite capacity and expanded service offerings. We also continue to advance the XCOM RAN ecosystem. Boingo completed a proof-of-concept trial demonstrating the ability for XCOM RAN to support next-generation private 5G deployments, and we believe the integration of our platform into Boingo's private network portfolio highlights growing partner engagement and commercial relevance. From a [ team performance standpoint ], momentum remains strong throughout the year. Average commercial IoT subscribers increased 6% year-over-year, while IoT hardware sales revenue grew 50% year-over-year. This growth reflects sustained demand across asset tracking, monitoring and safety applications as well as increasing adoption of higher-value solutions enabled by two-way connectivity. We believe these trends demonstrate both the durability of our IoT business and the upside potential as new capabilities continue to scale. The progress we made in 2025 reflects disciplined execution across multiple fronts, from infrastructure and regulation to product innovation and market expansion. We're moving decisively from groundwork to growth, and we believe we have a strong foundation in place as we enter 2026. Looking ahead, we remain confident in the strength of our strategic roadmap and our ability to execute against it. With key authorizations for C-3 and continued progress across our ground network, commercial momentum for two-way IoT capabilities and creating traction for XCOM RAN, we believe Globalstar is uniquely positioned to deliver differentiated connectivity solutions that combine satellite innovation, licensed spectrum and proprietary wireless technology. Finally, there's never been a more exciting time to be in space and the broader connectivity ecosystem. As demand continues to grow for resilient, interoperable solutions that bridge satellite and terrestrial networks, we believe Globalstar is ideally positioned to benefit from the convergence. One factor became increasingly clear last year, proprietary, globally harmonized spectrum matters. Our licensed MSS spectrum remains a core differentiator and a foundational asset as the market evolves. Whether it's traditional satellite communications, IoT, or D2D, our dedicated global space spectrum can enable flexibility, reliability and resiliency. The progress we achieved in 2025 reflects the talent and dedication of our global team, and we are energized by the momentum we are carrying into the year ahead. Thank you again for joining us today and for your continued support of Globalstar. We look forward to updating you on our progress in quarters to come. And I'll now turn the call back to the operator for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from Edison Yu of Deutsche Bank.

Congratulations on the progress and apologies about any background noise. First, I wanted to bring up a topic to you, Paul. There's been a lot of excitement about data centers in space. I think it's probably something maybe you don't want to maybe tackle directly as a company, but just curious on your thoughts about the idea of doing this and potentially some maybe ancillary opportunities that could evolve from that.

Yes. I mean, obviously, we're very focused on direct to sell and IoT and not really on the data center side. And obviously, with all the demand for compute and AI and the difficulties people are having building data centers and power being an issue, I understand why people are excited about it. And certainly, it creates another reason for needing launch capacity, which there's going to be increasingly more launch capacity as new vendors come online. So I understand sort of how the industry got excited about it. I mean I think there's a lot of technical challenges to it. Obviously, maintenance is a lot harder. Upgrades a lot harder. Cooling and so forth are hard in space. So yes, but this is a great technical challenge for people and certainly an interesting thing. And if you're a science fiction fan, it kind of maps out to a lot of things people have talked about over the years and about what humanity will do in space. So it's exciting. But yes, it's definitely not our focus area.

Understood. Understood. And then I mean switching gears, what should we think about -- how should we think about the next milestones for C-3 constellation? Is there anything this year that you would call out that would be in particular of particular importance?

Yes. I mean we just did the critical design review. So that's a very important portion of making sure that the system design and holistically, the entire system is designed well. And we will continue to do a lot of work in terms of network, ground network build-out. Obviously, a lot of work going on, on the regulatory side and some discussions are advancing well. And regulators are excited about the capabilities that Globalstar has already brought to market either by ourselves or with our partners, a lot of SOS and these kind of emergency capabilities, and it's been demonstrated over and over. So as we go to C-3, things only get better, more capabilities and so forth, more satellites in orbit. And so yes, we are continuing to just tick off, grind away. All these launches, it's not a high-level thing. It's really -- you got to be on top of every single little detail, and that's what the teams have been doing. And so it's -- yes, it's not one thing, it's sort of many, many things across the board to get done.

And last one for me, just on XCOM RAN, you made some progress since last quarter with Boingo. Can you just remind us or any kind of what specific customer KPIs were kind of validated or that you found to be very, very encouraging as part of this process? And does this give you more confidence in getting future pipeline for XCOM RAN?

Yes. So I mean, the kinds of things that people are obviously looking for the ability to get a lot of throughput in a dense environment. So that was the thing that we always touted about the technology in the beginning. But with Boingo, one of the other things that's really cool is that we can run the system over DAS, distributed antenna systems. So we can overlay that. And a DAS system generally just gives you more coverage, but not more capacity. But because we can process the data from each radio node or head, we can actually then increase the capacity in the system as well. And then there's other things that we've demonstrated in the warehouse automation space in terms of ease of deployment and the fact that if you cluster users in a given area, it does not really take down the capacity of the whole system, it still shares the capacity of all the radio nodes that are there. So that kind of capabilities and those kind of KPIs are super important. And then, obviously, just getting to commercial hardening, we've been [Technical Difficulty] testing the system under difficult circumstances, and we have been able to prove to very demanding customers that this system is commercially ready. And so in terms of the pipeline, [Technical Difficulty] we focused on warehouse automation, [Technical Difficulty] and now we are looking at what are the other use cases [Technical Difficulty] military use cases, and with Boingo, [Technical Difficulty] because we're talking about airports, stadiums, convention centers, places where there is high density of users and not to mention Boingo [Technical Difficulty] military bases as well. So I think the pipeline is definitely one we are excited by, some of the go-to-market partners that we have. I know as we said [Technical Difficulty] looking at [Technical Difficulty]. So these pipelines are great. And then as we look out, there's going to be a lot of demand for connectivity, for things like physical AI and so forth and we're extended by those opportunities. We're in the warehouse automation space, a lot of robotics. So these [Technical Difficulty] important and certainly throughput and latency are going to be important aspects of that.

Our next question comes from Mike Crawford of B. Riley Securities.

Could you help walk through the utility of having both MSS and terrestrial 5G flexibility with your S-band spectrum and as well as perhaps maybe how we should think about any potential interference issues?

Yes. So obviously, we have talked about the fact that in the future, there is a lot of synergy between warehouse automation and the fact that you can track using IoT, satellite IoT anywhere you go and cover a complete supply chain and logistics. So those kinds of things are obviously super interesting, but it's also just the fact that because of [Technical Difficulty] that we have spectrum globally, and so for companies that are and partners that are looking to have some kind of terrestrial capability anywhere in the world, the fact that we have that spectrum [Technical Difficulty] we really believe that we can go get those opportunities to the extent that our partner is interested in that as well. So it is a nice synergy due to the global nature -- global, harmonized nature of it. From an enterprise standpoint, I mean the idea is that if you are in cellular coverage or you're running a terrestrial network on that spectrum, if a device is not immune, [Technical Difficulty] which frequency bands are being used, which time is being used [Technical Difficulty] what system data the end user needs to use at a given time. Our satellite [Technical Difficulty] first version of the two-way modem does not have multimode capability, that is what we are working on right now. So that is going through certification so on and so forth, so they'll have multimode capability very quickly and be able to manage both and, of course, support terrestrial [Technical Difficulty] modes.

Okay. Paul, actually, it's a little difficult to hear you because your line is breaking up a little bit. I'll just ask one final question. But can Globalstar share any targeted launch windows for the replenishment satellites this year?

We have -- we're not updating. We're saying second quarter this year for the first launch and the second half for the second launch.

[Operator Instructions] And our next question comes from Greg Pendy of Clear Street.

Congrats on 2025. I just wanted to zero in on the IoT offering. Can you remind us when your services went live for two-way communications. I believe it was somewhat mid-quarter? And in addition, it looks like from your ARPU, you haven't changed pricing. Is that correct? And is that likely to continue going forward?

Sure. So what's going on, on the two-way system is that our customers are actually building out their solutions right now. So you won't see revenues from two-way IoT and any significant amount right now. And these -- the customers are in process of validating their end-to-end systems and so forth. So still a little bit more that the module went commercial, it's tested, it's hardened. It's in mass production now, and really, it's just -- we're waiting on the customers to finish their applications because these are built into some other device.

Okay. So is it fair to say that, that wasn't benefiting the subscribers too in the quarter because you had decent growth in...

Right. No, that's still one-way systems predominantly.

And our next question comes from Logan Lillehaug of Craig-Hallum.

Logan on for George this morning. You mentioned the contribution from Parsons in the quarter. I was hoping you could just talk kind of broadly about how the government pipeline has shaped up over the past few quarters and just kind of what you're seeing there? And kind of on that note, as we think about the longer-term guidance, how would you frame sort of what's considered in there from -- in terms of government contribution?

Okay. So the pipeline -- I mean, there's sort of 2 aspects to it. It's the things that we are already talking about, working about -- working with them on, and then there are other newer opportunities that we're still in the process of evaluating and [Technical Difficulty] focus on the near-term opportunities there. We haven't made any announcements about [Technical Difficulty] the idea that we will expand over other regions, and we get payment as other regions come online. And so that's the near-term. Then, as they shift their solution into the devices, then we get the revenue from [Technical Difficulty] predominantly today, it's the build-out of the network to support other regions of the world.

Got it. Just one other really quick one. Can you just remind us where you are on the upgrade of the ground infrastructure for the longer-term MSS network?

Yes. I mean it's -- so one good metric is we committed to the ITU of spending $2 billion on extending the network and we're halfway through that, and that includes money that went into the satellites as well. But it gives you a sense of how far along we are. That those build-outs are going quite well on the ground side. The company is pretty experienced in doing these kinds of things. We had to do it for the original -- launch of the original wholesale business for our customer. So we know how to do this pretty well. And we've been making continuous announcements as different countries come online. I mean you can see sort of a laundry list if you look through the press releases of all the places that are up and going now.

I'm showing no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the conference back to Paul Jacobs for closing remarks.

Well, thanks, everybody, again for joining us. It was a great year, a lot of stuff going on, and I really want to say thank you to our partners, our customers and really to all the employees at Globalstar, you guys have done an excellent job this year, really focused in on getting stuff done. And that obviously reflects [Technical Difficulty] results that our investors are looking for. So we will continue to execute and look forward to talking to you about our progress and our growth going forward. So thanks, everybody, again.

Thank you. We apologize if you experienced any technical issues today. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating, and you may now disconnect.