Iridium Communications Inc. (IRDM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to Iridium's 2021 Investor Day. I'm Ken Levy, Vice President of Investor Relations, and I appreciate you joining us for today's virtual event. We have a lot of material to get through this morning, and over the next 2.5 hours, you will hear from our executives about our market position and opportunities, operations, growth and strategies, business unit priorities as well as the products that are now being launched to support our financial goals. You will have an opportunity to submit your questions throughout today's event, which we will address during our Q&A session at the end of this program. [Operator Instructions] At the time of submission, questions will only be visible to Iridium's Investor Relations team. In the event that we cannot get through all questions during allotted time, Investor Relations will respond to your questions via e-mail. With those instructions, I now would ask you to review with me our safe harbor statements. Today's Investor Day presentation may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical fact and include statements about our future expectations, plans and prospects. Such forward-looking statements are based upon our current beliefs and expectations and are subject to risks, which could cause actual results to differ from forward-looking statements. Such risks are more fully disclosed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Our remarks today should be considered in light of such risks. Any forward-looking statements represent our views only as of today, and we may elect to update forward-looking statements at some point in the future, though we specifically disclaim any obligation to do so, even if our views or expectations change. Our presentations also may reference certain non-GAAP financial measures, including operational EBITDA and pro forma free cash flow, free cash flow yield, free cash flow conversion. These non-GAAP financial measures are not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to our most directly comparable GAAP measures is available on Iridium's Investor Relations website. With that, I'd like to start off today's program with a short video and then hand this off to Matt Desch. [Presentation]

Hello all. Matt Desch here, and welcome to our 2021 Investor Day. I'm really pleased you could join us, those of you who are live on this broadcast and watching this, and those of you who may be watching on replay. I'm really excited to be here in our Iridium lobby, a place I haven't spent a lot of time in the last year as probably many of you haven't either in your own offices and everything. But hopefully, with things getting back to normal, we can have a true Investor Day in the future, where you come in and we can show you our products and services. But in this case, I think this will be a way to connect with you and show you the breadth of our strategy and to discuss the next 5 years, in particular, as to where we go and the exciting future we think we have. So I look forward to spending some time with you today. Let me just give a quick summary anyway at this point about what you're going to see over the next 2 hours or so. And this is just a very short synopsis of some of the key themes I think you'll see, but I think you're going to see an awful lot of interesting material. First, I think we'll make the point that we are very uniquely positioned in the market right now. And not just in terms of growth, but really accelerating growth over the next few years because of our unique position and where we are today in the market. We'll also, of course -- having a brand-new network with a long CapEx holiday, we are in a unique period really where we will be generating significant cash flows and delivering on our strategy that we've long promised to return capital to shareholders. Third, I want to make a little bit of point about our competitive environment really, which is quite unique. Despite really a very hot satellite space, not many have really come to take us on directly in our unique position. And I want to make sure you understand exactly where we are, what we do and what we address so that you can appreciate that. Fourth, I think we're going to make a point today about our future strategy and where we think we're going to go in terms of really being embedded in many, many more things right now and playing a large role and increasingly more diverse role throughout the consumer ecosystem in particular. And finally, I think you'll appreciate, particularly as we move through Tom Fitzpatrick's presentation at the end why we don't see ourselves as a normal satellite company, and we don't think investors should value us that way either. So I look forward to spending this with you today. I, of course, have to introduce the team that will be talking to you today. I had a chart here where we all had suits and ties on, and that was a little scary since we haven't had those on in about 1.5 years, and I thought this was probably the more appropriate way to describe the team to you. You see Tom Fitzpatrick, who will -- at the upper left-hand corner, who's our CFO. He'll be kind of bringing it home at the end here. Bryan Hartin, our EVP of Commercial Services, will be discussing our growth strategy over the next 5 years, and why we intend to accelerate our growth. And Don Thoma at the bottom will be talking about Aireon because I know investors are very interested in Aireon's story, where they're at right now and their unique position in the market. I'm really sorry I couldn't bring the whole team here to really speak to you, but really Zoom wouldn't allow that in terms of the length of time to introduce the whole team. But of course, Scott Scheimreif, running our government services; Suzi McBride, our Chief Operations Officer; Tom Hickey, our Chief Legal Officer, are critical members of the team and actually are behind a lot of what we'll be talking to you today in delivering really the strategy of Iridium. So I can't start a presentation about Iridium without at least nodding to our unique and long history. And I think it is important to understand, we've really been an idea, an audacious idea going back really 30-plus years now. Going back all the way to 1987 when the idea of a low Earth orbiting system, providing communications to individuals was first created. And of course, Motorola was involved in those days. They started really the first true space race that seems very similar to today's hot market, but really excited the market with this idea of communications from space. Of course, that evolved over a long period of time to actually build this unique network. It was launched initially in 1997 and completed in 1998. And of course, it was a technical success, but a business failure given sort of the business structure that it had to do. And it needed a reset at that point to ensure that this value proposition could be valuable anyway to the world. And of course, we took that on. And really, over the last 21 years, it's hard to believe we've really had so much experience really in terms of building that model. And of course, we're looking ahead to a very bright future as a result of all that experience. So we're -- as I often say, an overnight success story in terms of where we are, we're highly valued today, but it comes from a great track record of a long experience. And of course, we've been together over the years here, but I think the last 5 years have been particularly transformational for us, just going back to 2017. If I think back at January of 2017, that first launch of our Iridium NEXT satellites was certainly the start of really the -- this -- the end of this phase of our development cycle as we had worked very, very hard over the previous 7 to 8 years to develop these new satellites, develop a new network and of course, seeing that launch go off successfully. It was a heart-stopper for me. I still look at this and remember that feeling in my heart as I was hoping and praying that they'd be successful. And of course, we retired a lot of risks that day, but not all. And over a period of the next couple of years, we retired a lot more as we built -- as we completed our Iridium NEXT network and put it into space. In 2018, of course, we had many milestones as we continue to launch the network. But we passed 1 million subscribers, which was certainly a symbolic milestone for us that we've long since eclipsed coming up on almost 50% more subscribers than that already in just the last few years. But it was an important milestone to see how we had grown over time. And of course, we completed this unique network, 66 satellites in Low Earth Orbit, in-orbit spares, all interconnected in space, providing a unique L-band personal communication services. And you can see, as I heard those last satellites went into operation, the relief that I had at that point. And frankly, I'll be honest, after a few years, I'm missing the excitement of that period, but I don't miss the $3 billion we spent on that network and spending that today. Of course, that year also, we introduced an exciting new service, broadband for the first time, really. True L-band broadband from Iridium, which we call Iridium Certus. There you see Bryan Hartin, who you'll see soon, testing his muscles out on our terminal and comparing it to the competition. It's certainly been a groundbreaking service and has been a successful one to date. We'll talk a little bit more about that in his presentation about our view of that market in the next 5 years. And then, of course, came 2020. It started out with a bang. It was pretty exciting beginning of last year. And then dark clouds -- I thought this picture is very appropriate. Dark clouds came on the horizon, and we all, through lock down in March and April, wondered exactly what 2020 would be like. But I think this is a particularly fitting image because there are bright skies ahead. We certainly are seeing that today. We came through the storm, if you will, of 2020, quite successfully. And I think that bodes well and demonstrates really the resilience of our business for the future. I thought this image was also very appropriate because it shows a ship. And of course, We introduced, at the end of 2020, a groundbreaking service to us, GMDSS, Global Maritime Distress Safety Services [ feed ], really creating a choice really in that market for the first time and an exciting way to sort of end 2020. 2021, well, I'm quite positive. I -- you could say this is one of my customers socially distancing themselves. I'd like to view it as revenue there on the top of a mountain, but it's certainly kind of indicative of the bright future we really feel like. And today, we're really going to be focusing on that a little bit. I mean we're back in the office here, at least in the office, but without lots of employees. But this picture, particularly, was the one that sort of spoke to me. This was a partner conference that we have on a regular basis in good times where we could really interact, get close and talk to our partners about growing their businesses, making them successful and continuing to accelerate our growth. And I can't wait to get back to that place both with them and with you as investors as well, where we can really sit down and truly talk. So this is a chart that I appreciate Chris Quilty not knowing he loaned to me anyway, but I stole it from him and enhanced it a bit. But I thought it was indicative of sort of the environment we're in right now. We are really in a kind of an interesting investment period in the whole space area where a lot of money is pouring in. Even in 2020, I thought this was interesting. 228 deals we counted, almost $19 billion of disclosed value across a number of different categories, particularly in the second half of 2020. And I think that's the environment we're in, and it's exciting. It's exciting to be part of an industry that's suddenly rekindled itself and is putting a lot of money into things. But I also wanted to sort of describe a chart here that I got from Northern Sky Research, which describes the whole size of the market, just to give an idea where we're in. We're on the left side of that, and it's interesting to see that sort of communications and infrastructure roughly is about 45% each of this $1 trillion space industry that money is currently flowing heavily into. There's also some applications and that sort of thing. But the quote that Northern Sky put in there about, "The commercialization of space is unlocking new use cases, new end users and overall driving this $1 trillion opportunity." But at the bottom line, it says, "Bottom line, the space economy transformation is underway, but connectivity remains the core revenue." And we agree, I think connectivity is still the core and the most important area, and we are in that space. But we're in it in a very unique way. So let's just talk about briefly about sort of our history in getting here. I'm going to be -- we're going to be focusing the rest of today on sort of the 5-year view of where Iridium is and what -- where we think we're going to be over the coming years, how we're going to exploit and use this new network and accelerate our growth over time and what that will really mean to our bottom line and cash flow. But we have to start really with our history. And there's going back to when we started the process of going public in 2009. You can see even during the installation of a brand-new constellation and even as we go through a pandemic, we have consistently grown our operational EBITDA, the true measure of sort of our increasing profitability and cash flow power at a 9% CAGR rate over that time. And that's pretty extraordinary. I also would mention, that is built on very important, is service revenue. That has also grown consistently and even accelerated a little bit as we moved into the new network as we added in hosted payload revenues and other things here. But that continues to grow nicely. It's actually been a 7% CAGR over the construction of our constellation. In terms of subscribers, this is a measure I look at almost on a daily basis to see how our network is going. And in fact, we have been accelerating. We go back to -- I took this one all the way back to 2001 when we really started. And you can see we've been on an increasingly growth area of subscribers now passing 1.52 million billable subscribers in the end of the first quarter. And that really is a demonstration, too, of the consumer business that we've been part of and how that has grown considerably over very recently. And I have to say 2021, we're still in a bit of a tier 2 in terms of subscriber growth as well. And the reason for that, of course, is our many partners. Our business model as a wholesale supplier of service really goes to market primarily through partners, companies that take our technology, put it in their solutions and sell it to their end customers. And of course, going back here to 2009, we had about 240 partners at that time. These were individual companies that either were service partners, value-added resellers, value-added manufacturers for us. That number has grown all the way to 500 at the end of 2020. And in fact, even in the last year. Last year was probably a down year for us where we added something like 17 new partners. I think the previous year, we'd added something like 26 or so. This year, we've already kind of outpaced last year's pace. I think we've added at least 10 new companies to our -- the relationship with us in terms of selling products. And that is one of the many ways that we grow our revenues and we continue to grow our business model. In fact, kind of talking about that, let's talk about our growth model. It's quite proven. It starts out, of course, with a network that is unique. It is the best really. In fact, I should mention, even in that previous chart and vision of partners is that they -- we've really never really lost, to my knowledge, an individual partner, somebody who came to us and wanted to go to some other supplier. And I think the reason for that is because of the competitive advantage that our network provides. But you add on top of that, new modules and products that we develop that are smaller, maybe lighter, faster, more cost effective, and that gives a way to take our business onto that network. And that is then taken by those more partners who are in more business areas, perhaps new business areas, and we'll be talking about some of those today as well as then adding on new services. For example, you saw even this week, our discussion of DDK Positioning and talking about precision GPS type services. All that is a model that we have worked very effectively over the last 21 years in this phase of our business. And that, of course, delivers service revenue growth, as I described, operational growth and cash flow. And that is a business model we're going to continue as we look into the next 5 years, continuing to exploit and continuing to work. And in some ways, a lot of the framework of what we're talking about today is around that business model. So let me talk briefly about sort of, again, where we are sort of in this space. It is a fast-moving and hot space overall. But I think I could describe this very clearly as being truly in a lane of our own. So many other companies becoming involved in this, but we really have chartered a unique path, and I think that's evident really in the environment we're in. Of course, it starts with our unique network. Just showing it always is sort of amazing, these 66 satellites going around the earth. Each satellite going around the earth every 100 minutes, all interconnected and connecting everything on the ground. We have to always really start with our unique network wherever we do. But I want to talk briefly about sort of the design of a satellite. And I know that's not a terribly exciting topic, and I was trying to think about how could I do this in a way that might be interesting. The term channelization probably sends chills up everyone's spine. But it's important to understand if you're trying to understand different satellite companies, when you hear something like, for example, Starlink launching a lot of new satellites and wonder if they're in Low Earth Orbit, aren't they doing what Iridium does? And you'll see, in fact, no, because they have a very different satellite communication architecture. And the way to think about that, I was trying to think of an analogy. One way to think about it is delivering packages. Because in some ways, a communication system is really delivering packages of data, voice and data to people, but it's how you package that data as to what your architecture will be. Think about that analogy. You could think about a large truck that delivers packages across state lines and between cities and to hubs. Certainly, the best way to do that perhaps, but isn't what you really want driving up to your street to deliver a package. You want something that looks a little bit more like this pulling into your driveway, not the truck. In the same way, if you're in a city or you're another kind of environment, you want increasingly refined ways of really delivering things just to you at the right time, at the right place. And I think that distinguishes the kinds of satellite systems there are. So you have those satellite systems that have been designed, what I would call, with big pipes. The whole system is provided for and is really good for commodity communications to provide high-speed services. Starlink Satellite is a -- Starlink terminal, for example, is a great example of this. It's a fantastic piece of engineering and perfectly suited for that role. But these systems are optimized for delivering hundreds of megabytes to a terminal. They typically have to have large aperture terminals because they're working in Ka or Ku band, which requires larger terminals and also the higher speeds that they have requires larger apertures to make the connections to satellites, even in Low Earth Orbit. They often certainly need power because they are power hungry. The more bandwidth, the more power. They're always on. And so they really provide a fixed price, which is great for fixed services, but sometimes you only need a little bit of data, and they really are very effective for applications. When they're described in IoT applications, it's more in a hub environment, not in a one-to-one connection. You have companies like us that are really optimized with what I would call small pipes, which are great for personal mobility and personal communication services. Systems like ours are optimized for kilobytes of data, delivering just what you need. They're able to be shrunk down into very low-cost, very small, very portable terminals for extreme high mobility kind of applications. They can be battery-powered because the data rates and the distances and stuff are small, so small antennas, battery powers. And they can -- and we can really just charge in all kinds of applications for just the amount of data required. So they're really great for IoT. In fact, our network is ideally suited for things like IoT and other types of applications. And I think the point to be made is you really can't do both of these from one satellite. So when you hear about these mega-constellations launch and everything, I just want to make the point that they're really optimized for those large terminals. If they tried to create a battery-powered small terminal, it could be done, but they would waste really megabytes worth of capacity really in their footprint, and that would be extremely inefficient for them to do. And they aren't doing that. And I think you probably have talked to them and verified that. So very different services. You have mobile satellite service providers that Iridium is part of, in L or S-band that are optimized for voice and IoT services. We can be certified for safety services. Very important because we are a dedicated service. It can't be really done from those large services. We have very small antennas and can be very battery powered, where these LEO mega constellations are obviously in a different category all to themselves. So just putting kind of describing really the whole space ecosystem really and where we fit in. You have -- I think this is a great way of looking at the market and certainly one that I think investors would appreciate. If you look at growth in the vertical axis and risk in the horizontal axis and try to kind of plot these new companies and everyone really in space on these, I think you see some trends sort of show up. First of all, a lot of these new space companies that are coming about, even a lot of these are not in communications, but even ones that are, are really in the very, very high-risk category, sometimes not even have their business models established. They certainly -- technology develop. They have to get into space. They often have to raise a lot of funding. But they offer, at least on paper, very high growth rates, too, and that's attractive, but you have to understand what the risk growth profile is. The legacy space players, these names that you've known for many, many years, particularly those in the fixed satellite services market that offer Ku and Ka-band service, are perhaps a little lower in risk, but not low risk because they're very low growth in this time, and they're still looking for ways. And since they are in primarily commodity businesses, are worried often about being -- be positioned in the marketplace in some ways. And so -- and they have been much lower growth. Even these new mega constellations that have been added really in there are still offer growth, but they offer a lot of risk as well. There is another zone in this chart here. And I would call that the higher-growth, lower-risk area in green here. And it's an area which I believe Iridium is situated in right now, where we are offering higher growth, and we'll be talking about what the next sort of 5 years looks to us and what it means. But we're also offering, especially at this time in our history after over 20 years in this -- and 30 years overall is sort of an idea. A lot of our risk has been retired so we can really, really focus on our business here. So today is a little bit about talking about growth and describing that in many ways. We have a number of growth vectors really across the company. We'll not be going into all of them. This is not meant to be a comprehensive day where we talk about every aspect of Iridium. We'll be focusing really on this thesis of what does the next 5 years look like and where are we going and what our future looks like. But we will be touching on a number of these subjects. I think it's important to note that they're enabled by a number of important factors, new partners, new business areas, new growth areas and you'll hear a number of those today, particularly from Bryan. We're going to focus a little bit more on this iridium Certus broadband and mid-band services, term that we created to describe sort of the range of services that our new network performs. And that's, of course, an important area for growth for us. Geographical expansion, not just of ourselves when we're licensed to, say, sell services in another country or whatever, but of our partners who are expanding their businesses beyond their first zones as well. And then licensing core technology. And this is an area I just want to spend a minute sort of focusing on for a second because I don't think we have really described that as a strategy enough to you. So I can sort of boil down a core part of Iridium's strategy is to basically be embedded in everything. We really want our technology, since it's highly scalable and mobile and insertable in things, to be scaled down. And there's really kind of 3 ways we can do that: we can be in end-user products; we can be in modules; and we can be in licensed core technology. If you start with end-user products, of course, that's how many people know us. That's how we started with a satellite phone many years ago and, of course, have offered many other ways of connecting the service. Those are products we create, including our Edge line, at one time a maritime product. Those are things which we understand the market. We can have the highest equipment margins for it, and we can have the greatest control really over the end user experience. And we will continue to invest in this area. We have new products coming, including over the next 5 years in this area, and that will be one area of our growth. The more primary way though that you see us going to market is through modules, taking our technology and putting it into a small transceiver, a radio, if you will, that can then be embedded into hundreds, if not thousands, of sort of partner solutions of every type. It's lower equipment margins for us, but it's a better way of really accelerating our business through our partners for service revenue growth around the world. And one nice aspect of sort of selling modules and signing up a partner is that we get a lot of a strong relationship and a partner investment in that business, and they end up staying with us for a long period of time and selling those solutions increasingly add on to their solutions with new technology. The final area that maybe we don't spend enough time talking about is license core technology. This is -- if we take the core of our technology, the way forms, the core software, if you will, in our switch, the way that we make a connection between a device, any device, and our satellite, and we license that intellectual property to a partner, they can then embed that much more closely into their solution. Perhaps into the core of a chip, into a processor, and it can be much a closer part. And we've seen that, for example, in Garmin inReach Mini, where they license technology from us. We've done that with some other partners as well, things like PTT product. But I think you're going to increasingly see this, and I think this is an important sort of message for today. You'll hear us talk a bit more about moving into the consumer space even in a bigger way because we think that as we are embedded in everything, we can be embedded in consumer products. We have a lot of effort in that area, and I think that could be a driver for us over the next 5 years as well. So summarizing my part here, just to talk a little bit more about our long-term strategy. We are going to first continue to execute on this capital return strategy that we have talked about for so long with you. You'll see today, and Tom will give you more -- an update on that as to how that's going and where we're being part of that. We still believe that's a core part of our strategy as our leverage declines and our cash flow increases that we return that to shareholders. On top of that, we're going to continue to explore new partnerships. Iridium is uniquely positioned in the industry. And we don't really compete with our -- either our partner channel or in many cases, all these other service providers. So a lot of people are talking to us about working together to provide multimode and interesting integrated solutions for customers. And we'll be looking at even larger partnerships over time that we think will be mutually beneficial and could really drive our continued growth and profitability. And then finally, we have sort of a developing M&A strategy. You can see a little bit of that. We made an investment a few years ago in Satelles. We just made one in another sort of a P&T company. This one positioned for precise positioning instead of resiliency and in-building penetration, but with DDK positioning this week. I'm sure you saw that. But we will occasionally make opportunistic investments in the future, and we'll continue to look at that. I can tell you more about what I wouldn't want to do. I'm not really interested in changing our business model. Not really looking to buy our channel because we've been very effective at not competing with our partner channel, and really don't see the need, like many other satellite companies are doing, where they're integrating and moving downstream because they have to because they're in commodity businesses. We don't really have to, so we can be much more selective about unique relationships in the channel that we think would be an advantage to the whole channel. And we really don't want to get out of our zone. We certainly don't want to get into the commodity broadband business in kind of any way. But this is an area we'll continue to work, especially as our cash flows grow. So I hope that gave you a high-level overview. We're going to speak -- the next part of the presentation will be Bryan Hartin, who will speak to sort of our growth strategy over the next 5 years and why we think we'll continue to accelerate our growth. Bryan? Thanks. We can kick in.

Yes. Great job. Thank you. Great. Thanks, Matt, and good morning, everybody. It's great to be here with you today. I think Matt did a great job of setting the table for me. I've got a lot of material to cover, so I'm going to get right into it. So I'm going to borrow some of Matt's themes, and that first theme is this -- the Iridium lane. Iridium has a clear lane of our own. Now others, some of our existing competitors, some of the new entrants, they might have multiple roads or they're swerving all over the road, but Iridium's road is really clear. Our road is freshly paved with our new network and Iridium's road leads to growth. And it's my job to accelerate growth, and that's what I'm going to be discussing with you over the course of the next 40 minutes. So the focus here is accelerating the growth. I'm also going to borrow another theme Matt talked about, which is our proven growth model. Now Matt talked about -- he's showed you a slide of subscriber growth, of service revenue growth and that didn't happen by accident. I had a seat at that table as we were developing that strategy. And I'm going to discuss how we're implementing this proven growth model to accelerate growth. And I'm going to focus on these 3 areas, but I'm also going to get into more of the proof points so I can bring this to life for you and make it a little bit more clear. And it will be -- accelerating growth, this is something you're going to hear me say throughout. So step one of the how. Create better ways to deliver our services. And that begins with our proven wholesale model. We're not going to compete. Inmarsat and others, they may say they don't compete, but simultaneously, they are running a very aggressive direct sales business. Some of the new entrants in the marketplace, they may say they're doing vertical integration. That's really code for they're going to go direct. This creates a lot of confusion in the market. It creates a lot of channel conflict. And quite honestly, it creates a lot of ill will with the partners in the distribution. The other key part of our model is expanding our enabling technology investment with modules and different forms of licensing our core technology. And this accelerates growth in our key markets. The other thing I want to just share with you is how this happens and give you some insight behind the scenes. So over the course of the last several years, I've built a very experienced and talented global team. They're committed to this model and they know how to execute it. And they bring a lot of expertise from different areas, from different geographies, different markets, technical expertise. But they've also built this great ecosystem through developing very strong relationships that are built on trust. And there's one thing you can't coach, you can't teach it. They've got to have the passion and this team has it. So you're going to see this culminate in us accelerating growth, but there's more aspects to this model than just what you see here. The second step of the how is more partners in more industries. And how we do this is we prospect, we qualify, we recruit, and we develop partners that can contribute to growth. It's very similar to like a sports franchise, right? You've got an NFL team. They've got a scouting department. That scouting department goes and looks for different talent. They recruit that talent and then they develop it. And that's what we do on a daily basis. You can also see that there's different brands on this slide, some well-known, some not so well-known. But they have all been recruited and gone through this process, and now they're contributing to our growth. Just a quick example, Caterpillar. When I got here back in 2012, we were in the later stages of bringing Cat on board and signing the contract. Well, now today, they are our #2 IoT partner in terms of installed base. They have driven growth. Another partner that hasn't been with us as long is Doosan. Doosan is a heavy equipment OEM based in Korea. They haven't been with us as long, but they are now within our top 15 account partners in terms of the installed base that they've driven. And Matt talked about the partner count, right? Well, we're engaged with over 100 potential partners across the business. Now some of them we'll bring on direct. Others, they may have the right stuff, but they're maybe not the right size or scale to be with direct with Iridium. So we'll line them up and play a matching game with other partners to get their contribution. So the secret to this is really find more future partners that can contribute and develop them. So this is what accelerating growth looks like. There's a lot of real use cases across many markets in our business. I'm going to get deeper into the how with some of these specific examples, but what I want to focus on next is how does Iridium create unique service capabilities that no one else can. So let's start with personal communications. You've heard a lot from Matt in terms of the growth in this business. But let me really get into the intent of personal communications. It's really pretty simple. People want to stay connected while they're off the grid. And at a minimum, they want to be able to do messaging. Now one of our anchor partners in personal communications is Garmin. And I'll tell you a story back several years ago before Garmin acquired DeLorme, I went to Yarmouth, Maine, and that was where we saw the beginning of them embedding Iridium in their personal communicator with our enabling technology. But there's also new entrants that have come on the scene, Zolio, for example. Zolio is the combination of 2 of our partners, Roadpost and Beam, and they've got a really smart approach to the market. They're focused on terrestrial users who are right on that border of terrestrial coverage. And as they go in and out of terrestrial coverage, they use Zolio to stay connected. We've also got partners like Somewear Labs and Bivy, who are also doing something similar, all with a different focus and a different twist. But the key is that Iridium's enabling technology uniquely enables these partners, and these partners enable Iridium's personal communications growth. And what we're really focused on to grow this is to look for more partners that are working on connected technology. What we really want is to get more partners with more SKUs that can contribute to that growth. So let's look at the L-band opportunity for personal communications. If you look at roughly our 1.5 million subscribers, about 1/3 of them are Iridium connected personal communicators. And what we estimate is that in 2000 -- by 2025, we'll roughly be at about 1.3 million Iridium connected personal communicators. And we're going to get there in part by continuing to expand the existing base of partners and also rely on some of the existing partners to grow. But we're also adding more capability for our personal communications partners. Back when I was in terrestrial wireless many years ago, when we introduced pictures to cell phones, that's when a lot of the growth really happened and it exploded. And we have had similar conversations with our partners who are in personal communications, and they are really asking for Iridium to provide them with the capability so that they can deliver pictures and enhanced messaging. But there's also some requirements that we got to make sure we stick to in some of the principles in personal communications, and that is making sure that we maintain that small form factor that provides the additional capability, maybe a little bit faster, but very affordable. So we're going to do that by licensing our core technology to our existing partners. And I don't want to get too technical here, but so you understand the subtle difference. Narrow band is 2.4 kilobits per second. What we're talking about is licensing that core technology so that we slightly enhance that speed and capability maybe to the 4.8 kilobit per second range that enables the partners to deliver those pictures and enhance the messaging. So let's take it a step further. Let's make it -- Iridium's goal here is to make this more mainstream when we talk about personal communications. And there's a tremendous opportunity with smartphones. Today -- or in 2020, the market report was that there's about 3.6, billion, with a B, mobile devices across the world. That's expected to grow by 2023 to 4.3 billion smartphones. And Iridium's goal is to enable those smartphones so that you're never off the grid, so that you're always able to message at a minimum. But similar to personal communications, how are we going to do that? Well, we're going to do that by enabling and licensing our core technology to some select partners. But that same requirement, that same guiding principle of having a form factor that is -- fits the current smartphone size, providing that Iridium-enabled capability so that they can message when off the grid, and it's got to be affordable. So how do you do that? Well, we've got to have some discussions with select partners, qualify them, prospect, identify whether they've got the development capability to be able to do this. But the goal here is to get Iridium-enabled smartphones into the hands of consumers. Now you may look at that and go, well, is that realistic? Yes, it is. It's realistic because we've done it in personal communications. We have enabled very small devices to be able to support Iridium Communications. It's a bit aspirational, but we're exploring our options. We're looking at who are the right partners to start to engage in discussions. But make no mistake, this is a transformational opportunity for Iridium, and we intend to pursue it so that we can get there. The other key thing, and Matt talked about this, is that there's no one else that can do this. There may be some claims of some that can do it, but Iridium has the proven track record to be able to do it and that's what we intend to pursue. So let me move to broadband, Certus Broadband, and start with Maritime growth. So just like we have an established, clear lane of our own, the same thing is true in Maritime, but it just happens to be a shipping lane. We've got a clear shipping lane of our own. But we've got a strong position, a really strong position. We've got superior L-band speeds, and we've got a safety heritage to build from. Now GMDSS gets the headline, and I'll talk about GMDSS because it deserves some attention. But there were other safety services, and I won't get into all the acronyms, but we've been very involved in Maritime safety for a long time. The other thing here is I'll just distinguish, we're not Inmarsat. I'll tell you a bit of a quick story is that Inmarsat launched FX, Fleet Xpress, before we launched Certus, but this is based not on my view. This is partner feedback that, that launch was cumbersome. It was probably premature. There were a lot of issues that they had to resolve, and it didn't go well. Contrast that with the partner feedback that Iridium received that Certus, Maritime broadband and Certus Broadband in total, was one of the best MSS L-band launches they've ever experienced. That was because we took our time to develop the service and the products. We took our time to test them in the lab. We took our time to trial them in real-world environments, and that made a huge difference. The other aspect of this is we attracted world-class value-added manufacturers, or VAMs. We attracted the likes of Cobham, Thales and Intellian. And those companies have shipped over 5,600 terminals to our partners to date. So with all the things going on in the world in terms of supply chain and things like that, our partners have the terminals and the equipment to be able to fuel Certus, Maritime broadband activations. There's also a couple of other initiatives that we're looking forward to. We're very connected to the Maritime industry, again, with that experienced team that I have. And there's a few initiatives. One is connected ship, the other is Maritime digitization. But there's one proof point that I'll share with you. And IMOCA, which is the international monohull class of racing, may not be familiar to everyone, but this is similar to the Volvo races. It's a very prominent race -- series of races that are held around the world. Iridium was selected, along with our partner, Thales, as the official communications partner. Why? The reason is, is that our reputation was built on what I just talked about, and we're able to operate in environments where these vessels race. They're not racing in a lake in the U.S. They are in very treacherous waters, in very harsh environmental conditions, that's where Iridium thrives. So we were selected for -- to be the communications a partner of choice because they knew they could rely on us, they trusted us, and it's been going very well. The other initiative that we're involved with is autonomous shipping. Autonomous shipping is really starting to be studied by the industry. The IMO is studying it at their various conferences, and we're involved in that. We're involved in several projects related to autonomous shipping, and I won't totally reveal everything, but there's probably going to be an announcement pretty soon that you're going to see where Iridium was selected, again, as the provider of choice for an autonomous vessel that's going to be going on a significant voyage. So stay tuned for that. But I've talked about now Certus, Maritime broadband and Certus Iridium broadband for Maritime in general. So let's take a look at the opportunity. So if you look today, we've got about 12,000 Iridium connected vessels. That's a combination of OpenPort connected vessels as well as Certus-connected vessels. We've been working through the COVID impact, as Matt referred to. Yes, there were some dark clouds in 2020, but we're starting to see those dissipate, and we're starting to see things pick up. Is it back to normal? No, it's not. But we start to see it improving. So we estimate that, by 2025, we'll be on about 21,000 Iridium-connected vessels. It's a reasonable view. It's not overly aggressive, but it's a very reasonable view that we can do this. And depending on what analyst report you use, we used a few sources that you can see here, we view that we can grow that market share from where we're at today, which is about, call it, 5%, and we can grow that to 10% to 15% market share for Maritime L-band by 2025. How are we going to do this? We're going to -- there's different sources. There's primary in VSAT companion retrofits. There are greenfield opportunities for Maritime L-band. And there's narrow band upgrades. And we're also going to take our share from Inmarsat. There's several players in this, right? There's Thuraya, there's Inmarsat, there's Iridium, there's probably a couple of others, but we focus primarily on Inmarsat. It's kind of like when you're a kid, and I'm probably dating myself, playing battleship, you and the other guy, looking at your various screens, but we're not Inmarsat. If you look at a prime example, Speedcast, who just went through a difficult time, but they've gone through their bankruptcy process. And in that process, they decided to cut ties with Inmarsat. That gives us opportunity to work with them, but it's another proof point that there are prominent Maritime service providers who would rather not partner with Inmarsat, so that they can benefit from their own Ku VSAT solutions, and I'll get into that in more detail. But we want to continue to enhance our position. What I've talked about doesn't get us to where we want to go. So let's talk about GMDSS, Global Maritime Distress Safety System. If you don't know anything about GMDSS, it's the E911 for Maritime. When the ship's in distress, they know that they can hit a button and somebody is going to come help them. This was a process for Iridium. This was not a 20-minute process that we went through. Back in 2013, right after I just got here, we developed a strategy to really pursue GMDSS approval. It took 5 years, and there was some opposition along the way. But in 2018, after a lot of hard work, both from a regulatory perspective, a market perspective and a technical perspective, iridium was approved as a GMDSS qualified service provider. And I'm just going to point out 1 other aspect here. There's a terminal image that you can see in that slide. That is our partner, Lars Thrane. That company is run by Peter Thrane, who is the son of Lars Thrane, smart move to use his name. Lars Thrane is -- he's a rock star in the maritime industry. He's really the father of GMDSS. He founded Toronto and Toronto, which was later acquired by Cobham. Part of the story, I'll just tell you that we, during this approval process, it culminated in a meeting with the IMO in London to finally get the approval. We worked with all the delegations. We worked with the IMO. We're in pretty good shape. We did an event, Lars Thrane showed up and so did Woody Johnson who was, at the time, the U.S. ambassador to the U.K. Lars Thrane was the main attraction. So I did a presentation there, and that's when we finally culminated that week with the approval. Why is that important? The reason I bring you through all that is that process, that perseverance delivered the approval, which gives us the street cred. It gives us that seal of approval from maritime industry. We broke that monopoly, now Iridium is an approved alternative to Inmarsat for GMDSS. We launched it in 2020, and we've got real advantages, coverage, we cover the globe. Capability, voice and data in a single terminal, cost advantage because you only need 1 terminal. And as these northern sea routes open up, and they're not just opening up seasonally. These northern sea routes are going to be open constantly. So companies are starting to test whether they -- how they can navigate these sea routes. And one thing that's always on those vessels is Iridium in some form or fashion, Cosco, other very notable shipping companies make sure that before they leave for 1 of these northern routes, they've got Iridium on board. One last thing here. As I'll just leave you with the IBM reference. So what I mean by that is that a lot of times in maritime, in other industries, nobody ever got fired for recommending IBM. The same used to be true in maritime with Inmarsat. It's not true anymore because GMDSS gives us the halo effect that we're looking for, gives us that street cred. And the industry looks at us and says, if GMDSS, they can support that, their products are good for us. Additionally, we will be expanding this and enhancing our position by adding GMDSS onto Certus, and that will be coming here in the not-too-distant future. Another example of enhancing our position is VSAT Companion. We -- Iridium really is, I would say, the de facto standard for VSAT Companion. How does this help Iridium's growth? VSAT is growing. But L-band is always -- usually required as a companion or a backup, because VSAT, they'll get in adverse weather conditions where it doesn't work. They'll go outside of coverage where it doesn't work, and you need a companion. And as partners view Inmarsat as competition to their own, and it's more lucrative Ku VSAT offerings, we're becoming, as I say, the obvious choice or the de facto standard. I'll just point you to one other image on this slide because I love it, is the image on the right there may look kind of mundane, but that is exactly what I'm talking about. That is a replacement by one of our Asian partners of an FX, or Fleet Xpress, Inmarsat installation. The first part is then taking the Fleet broadband offboard and putting on Iridium Certus, in this case, a Cobham terminal. But that Inmarsat terminal you see behind them is going to be gone. That's going to be replaced with that service provider's own Ku offering, that's a real-life example of what I'm talking about. So that's kind of the position in terms of Certus Broadband Maritime. Now let me transition to Certus aviation broadband. Just like the clear road, shipping lane, we got a clear flight path. There's a lot going on here, okay? And let me decipher it for you. The development, what's going on is product development plus safety service, safety certification going on simultaneously. We've attracted world-class VAMs, again, Collins, Honeywell, Satcom Direct, Thales, SKYTRAC, many others, and we're building on that safety heritage that we have in our narrowband installed base. We just got interim approval for a major regulatory hurdle. It will be formalized the end of June, but I'm pretty confident that will happen because it's mostly a rubber stamp. And that will allow us now to really start to move towards certification. There's things called FANS trials, future aviation navigation service trials. This is basically taking Certus terminals, putting them on actual planes and airliners to test the product in that environment. We've got to complete the product development. We've had good progress there. It's been a little slower because it's a little more complicated than maritime and land. But we have partners who are doing on air testing now. Collins just -- Collins Aerospace just came out with an announcement that showed that, but that doesn't mean that we have to wait for safety in total before we can start driving Certus aviation revenue. There's non-safety product and service that we're going to launch later this year, probably late -- toward the end of the year. But this is going to allow us to get on some of these aircraft that don't require safety services. Here, again, there's a few players, but we're primarily competing with Inmarsat. But our opportunity is there's already plans to add Iridium Certus to existing HF deployments so that there's a backup satcoms. And we're also reviewed as the alternative to Inmarsat's SwiftBroadband. The other source of this is key, right? We are leveraging new builds across several aircraft categories. Wide-bodies, narrow bodies, business aviation, turboprops and rotorcraft. And these ARPUs, they're meaningful. The ARPUs in this space are going to be somewhere in the $600 to $650 range. So a lot going on, but we're making progress, and I feel good about where we've been and where we come from with some of these development, these recent developments on the regulatory side and the development side. So let's look at the aviation L-band broadband opportunity. And I'm going to be a little deliberate here because I want to make sure this is clear. So today, we've got about 36,000 Iridium-connected aircraft with no, let me repeat, no Certus-connected aircraft. That's all our narrow band equipment or Iridium-equipped aircraft today. By 2025, we estimate that our target is that we'll have roughly 3,000 to 4,000 Iridium Certus-connected aircraft and plus, there'll be more ongoing narrow band growth as well. So that's our view of where we're at today in narrow band, but where we're going to be in terms of Certus aviation, broadband-equipped aircraft. I mentioned the new builds, and that's important. That's a big source for this. You can still have retrofits in aviation, but the majority of this is going to come from leveraging new builds. And our estimate is based on reports is that between now through 2025, there'll be about 13,000 new builds across those different types of aircraft. Boeing put out a report that by 2039, there'll be 43,000 new builds during that time frame. There's been a shift, rather than trying to maintain existing aircraft to more focus on new builds, that's good for our Certus aviation business because it's a great source for aircraft. So this aviation recovery is underway. We're seeing some benefit of that in our narrowband business but we look to capitalize on it for Certus Broadband aviation. So let me talk a little bit about the U.S. government. So Scott Scheimreif, who's my friend and colleague, who runs our U.S. government business. He's authorized me to talk about the U.S. government today. But we're also -- this also -- we're enhancing our position in the U.S. government with Certus Broadband. Iridium is obviously clearly a recognized network, a current network of choice by the U.S. government. And Certus Broadband is now being adopted by the U.S. government. It will be a contributing capability for global secure communications for the war fighter. And there's some strategic planning going -- there is strategic planning going on with the U.S. government. Obviously, there's some areas of focus. One being the Arctic and Iridium's coverage that were global coverage, especially at the poles, that gives us the ability to support those plans from the U.S. government. So it's -- the other thing is some of these competitive emerging networks, they're not really feasible yet, either technically or commercially to be considered by the U.S. government. We're going to make sure we take advantage of that with our Certus broadband that's focused on the U.S. government. Scott and team are doing a great job of working with that. So what does this look like in terms of the opportunity? So today, we've got roughly based on the industry reports we use, probably less than 5% of the market share with the U.S. government. That's outside of EMSS. So this is just Certus broadband or broadband opportunity within the U.S. government for L-band. By 2025, we look to grow to roughly 15% to 20% market share for the U.S. government. Again, fairly reasonable, not overly aggressive, but we've got a good start. We're starting to get traction with the U.S. government, especially in-land mobile. And as I mentioned, Scott and his team are all over that. So we've covered personal communications and broadband, but now let me talk about an entirely new category. And I talked about this in 2019, but to refresh you on the strategy, let me start with narrowband. That was what built our heritage, with enabling technology plus some finished products. We then made the conscious decision as part of the strategy to introduce Iridium Pilot or OpenPort so that we could go after that lower end maritime broadband opportunity. As we planned for the development of NEXT, the strategy was very deliberate. Just like a battle plan, we were going to go and take the high ground, right? And that decision resulted in the introduction of Iridium Certus 700 service, gives us superior speeds to the competition, and we attracted those world-class VAMs. So we took that high ground quickly. Well, just like any battle, you got to pivot back and secure the territory that you just covered. We plan to do that with Certus 200. That's speeds that are less than -- slightly less than 200 kilobits per second. I'll get into that in a little bit more detail, but it covers a bit of a gap that we wanted to address, and we could. But now we are going to pivot back and secure this territory. And this territory is open, it's significant, and we have the plan and the technology to do it. We're going to use that same proven growth model. We have enabling technology in the form of a 9770 that is going to be used to work with multiple VAM partners to develop products that meet the requirements in this space. Let me make sure you're clear on what mid-band is. So narrowband, 2.4 kilobits per second. Broadband, whatever your definition is, 128 kilobits per second. There was some -- there's a lot of zone in there where end users would look at 2.4 and go, "it's not enough," Or, "A broadband is a bit of overkill." At less than 100 kilobits per second, Certus mid-band is perfect for end users who would have otherwise not considered MSS L-band. That is the definition in terms of what we're going after. It opens up an entirely new category, and it addresses a sweet spot, but it was a gap in the market. I'm going to share another story with you. So I go to a lot of the trade shows. I was at CommunicAsia, which is the preeminent telecom show in Singapore annually. It didn't happen last year, but usually, it does. So back right before we introduced Certus broadband, probably the '17-time frame, I got approached by several partners, but 1 partner stood out. And that partner challenged me, so why didn't you guys come out with -- what he basically didn't call it, but it was mid-band. There's a lot of use cases that he identified as a partner that he just couldn't satisfy with narrowband or broadband. I told them, "hey, hang tight, we're taking the high ground with 700, but we are going to come back and secure the mid-band territory or that gap," and that's where we are today. We're about to deliver on this. So just a little bit more of how this fits. I'm going to use the Goldilocks analogy. We feel like this is just right. Narrowband's too cold, broadband is too hot, mid-band is just right. And we've got the pole position on this. You could also argue that we really have the only position on this. You get higher ARPUs, the narrowband, and we're the only ones that can do it. Starlink can't do this. You can't take their terminal and meet the requirements in this space like we can. The other key to this that enabling technology, you got to have value-added manufacturers that are motivated and interested to develop products for this space, we've got it. We've got a roster of partners that we use to start, but we've got many more that we are engaged with who want to get into this space. And we've got service providers and VARs who want to do the same thing. Mid-band addresses an underserved markets that aren't perfectly suited for MSS narrowband or broadband, but mid-band is the fit. Matt mentioned the semi in the courier, well, for mid-band, you just can't have that semi showing up to your cul de sac to deliver that information. And you can't wait for that courier in a moped. That delivery van is perfect. That's what -- what we're looking at here in terms of mid-band. I said I'm going to bring this to life. Let me do that. I'm not going to go through all the use cases, but there are some that are really obvious and prominent. And that the first 1 is UAVs. There's a few examples here. Flylogix. I'll start with Charles Tavner, the CEO. I was on the phone with him about a month ago, helping coordinate a trial that they wanted to do. What they're all over and all about is methane detection over oil rigs. It's very important, and it's a lot more efficient to do that with the UAV than other alternatives. Zipline, their UAV that delivers blood to remote areas. Boreal, doing weather monitoring across several locations. And one that is very significant given the current environment with the pandemic is Swoop Aero, delivering vaccines to remote areas. We, at Iridium, are uniquely qualified to serve the UAV market because of our size, reliability, the performance that we provide and the cost. These UAV examples that I give you, they're using Iridium for command and control, for navigation as well as some sensor relay of that information. So well suited for this. We're all over this. Many more partners want to engage with us. Won't get into all the details here, just a perfect example. Mobile banking in a remote environment. Narrowband, not enough, broadband too much, and this is able to support with mid-band IP connectivity, which we couldn't do in the narrowband environment. And Matt talked about the small SIPs of communication. This is perfect for us. It's an affordable price point. And the data requirements are small and they're transactional, and that's perfect for mid-band to meet these kinds of requirements. So it opens up many new opportunities in mid-band across many of our existing markets that we can now cleanly and clearly address with mid-band. Now some of our competitors, like Inmarsat, they would try to address this with a Fleet One. It wasn't just right, beginning to end, not right. So they're trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. We've got the pole position. We've got the only position on this, and we got partner excitement. I mean I know real partner excitement when I see it. They are interested in working with us to build product and offer services. This is going to become, mid-band, a volume contributor to Iridium's business. We're going to be launching some of these product services here later this year. We're going to get it right. We're going to do the testing. It's going to be rolled out in a quality fashion. But if you can't tell, we're very excited about this. So I talked about mid-band addressing some gaps. Let me talk about how we're addressing some other gaps. So we're investing in some finished IoT products and introducing new broadband service class, Certus 200 that I talked about. Iridium Edge, it eliminates the development effort, and it accelerates the time to market. Now we've got qualified partners, and they have development capability that they can satisfy certain solutions, they just don't have the desire or the wherewithal to go develop a product for that. So what Iridium Edge does, it gives them that platform, it gives them that product choice so that they don't have to worry about that. They can focus on what they do well, and that is developed solutions and sell those to end users. Certus 200. This adds another Certus broadband service class that's less than 200 kilobits per second. It hit the sweet spot. It also allows us to maintain those Certus broadband ARPUs. But what the market wants and what our partners want is that in a bit of a more affordable form factor. So the partners are excited about Certus 200. It's volumes quick -- will quickly grow as it's adopted later this year. And for certain use cases, it's great across maritime, land mobile and aviation. Not going to go through all these use cases for Iridium Edge, but just talking about that partner count. Again, we're engaged with 50 partners that we've signed. There's another 50 in the funnel. Some of those are existing, some of them new, but that's the level of partner activity that we've got here. And like I said, we're engaging those new partners with development capability, and they're excited to have a platform to meet their customer requirements. Our team is all over this, and there's a lot of buzz building around Iridium Edge. I mentioned that sweet spot for Certus broadband. I'm just going to focus on 1 here, rail. As Certus 200 rolls out, rail's really become one of those areas that we're well suited for. There's positive train control, which is an initiative in rail, especially for safety in command and control. We've got a real advantage here because trains operate in remote environments and they need reliable communications. So we're well positioned in maritime, aviation as well and land mobile, which I just talked about. So to wrap this up. So we're well positioned for this accelerated growth that we're talking about. We're clearly focused on our lane. We got a clear strategy with that proven growth model. We've got enabling technology that we're making the right investments in, and we're adding new partners that can contribute. We're also offering services that nobody else can, and you've seen the key growth accelerators in personal communications, broadband in this whole new mid-band category, and I got a world class team. Iridium has a world class team that we can rely on, and we've got excited partners. The partner community and ecosystem are very jazzed. We've weathered this COVID storm, and we're positioned to capitalize and stimulate growth beyond these 2021 levels. So I said I'd bring this to life. Let me do that. Obviously, we're seeking to improve our performance, right? We want to get to that zone, if you will. So just like any athlete, whether you're a marathon runner trying to get -- you get into that zone. I'm not a marathon runner, but I hear that you get into that zone around the 16th, 17th mile, becomes effortless, all you can see is the finish line. You get a pitcher and no hitter, hopefully a New York Yankee, that is pursuing a no hitter, and they get into that zone. They can't hear the crowd, all they can see is the catcher's mitt. Or he can be a young 50-year-old, who's pursuing a major -- you're in that final round. Again, the crowd disappears, all you can hear is your caddy or see your caddy, and that fairway, it looks like it's a mile wide. There's another zone, but I wasn't all that familiar with, but it's this racing zone. And apparently, once you hit like 7,000 RPMs in racing, you get into this zone. And so I watched this movie Ford v Ferrari. I don't know if any of you watched it. Matt Damon's in it. He plays Carroll Shelby, who's a famous racecar driver and racecar builder. And Christian Bale plays Ken Miles. He's a famous racecar driver. And the premise of the movie is that Ford's trying to build cars that can beat Ferrari at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, which is a famous race. So Matt Damon does a great job of narrating this better than I could. But his description of getting into that zone at 7,000 RPM, car becomes weightless, the road becomes clear, you become one with the car. But there's a particular scene in this movie. So they're in a qualifying race to get into the 24 Hour Le Mans and Ken Miles is in the car. But they're getting toward the end of the race, and it's become pretty obvious they aren't going to win. So Matt Damon walks to the -- who's playing Carroll Shelby, walks to the apron of the racetrack to try to motivate Ken to get into that zone. And he holds up this sign, "7,000+, Go Like Hell!" And Ken Miles responds, he ends up winning that qualifying race. Carroll Shelby, Ken Miles and Ford go on to win 24 Hours of Le Mans 4 consecutive years from '66 to '69. So that's what success looks like. And just like Ken Miles, Christian Bale, had Matt Damon in his ear saying, "7,000, Go Like Hell!", I got Matt Desch in my ear saying, "7,000+, Go Like Hell!" And we aim to get there. We may not win 4 consecutive Le Mans, but we are going to accelerate growth for Iridium. So with that, I will hand it back to Matt.

Thank you, Bryan. I always thought Matt Damon and I looked a lot like anyway here, so it's appropriate analogy. No, I really appreciate Bryan coming up here. I hope you got a chance to see us dig into -- a little deeper into that part of the market. Bryan and his team and Scott Scheimreif and his team really are at the pointy edge of the stick in terms of our growth for the next 5 years. So -- and you see a lot of me and Tom and Ken, of course, but you don't get a chance to sort of see the people who are actually working the growth and the strategy and where we're going. So glad that Bryan could spend some time on that. So we're past halfway in the program here. Two more -- a little bit shorter presentations to make. But I wanted to just talk about something briefly. In the last Investor Day a couple of years ago, I remember I brought Michael O'Connor and Satelles, which we had just recently made an investment in. And I wanted to briefly mention that Satelles time and location -- Satellite Time and Location, which is our name for service, Satelles is the value-added reseller for that service and a partner of ours, has done very well over the last couple of years. And I asked Mike just give me a charter too that I could present today to you to kind of update you on that quickly. Again, STL, or Satellite Time and Location, is a unique service, can only be delivered through our network. It provides sort of a time reference signal for many digital products to update themselves. It penetrates deep into building to provide sort of a time reference signal for things like in building base stations and it protects national infrastructure, certainly, can be worked in many other areas. I have to say, I'm -- really, I'm happy with the way Satelles is developing as a market. We'll talk a little bit in Tom's presentation about what that means. But I appreciate him sharing some use cases with you. He believes, and I think I see his point here, that the average recurring revenue from markets like defense is a $200 million-plus market for them. Critical infrastructure, protecting the power grid, things like that, a $500 million market. IoT, in support of many of our other partners and in all the different applications to provide the growing IoT market. Time -- alternate time information stuff is maybe a $1 billion market. And the cybersecurity that they're just really not even penetrated yet but are really just getting started, bringing some level of time into the equation to protect infrastructure, to protect people, to prove where you are as opposed to just prove what your password is and that sort of thing is a $3 billion market. But I thought it was interesting, he says that they believe that over the 5 years, they see a revenue CAGR in their business over 40%, with revenues exceeding $100 million annually by 2025. So they certainly see a really big opportunity. We're really glad to be investing in them. And Tom can mention a little bit more about what that means. Also, just to bring up this time just because it's so recent, DDK Positioning, a couple of -- we've mentioned that, very different in the same time area, if you will, but really more focused on precision time for partners in areas like maritime and in agriculture and in engineering and places like that. So a different technology but a good example of what we would invest in. Investments and things you can't do via other networks that are very, very important, that enhance our partner ecosystem, and I think those are good examples of that. So with that, I'd like to move to the next presentation, which I know is another person you don't get a chance to see a lot of, but I know you're very interested in because of all your questions. And that is Don Thoma, who's the CEO of Aireon. He created that business, and he's been running it successfully even as aviation stopped in the last couple of years last year, but we really see a bright future for that. So short video here, and Don will join you. Thank you. [Presentation]

Well, thank you, Matt, and hello, everybody. I'm really happy to be here with you today to share what we've been doing at Aireon. As Matt mentioned, this is an industry that moves pretty slow. It's air traffic control, by its nature, is all about safety. So it's really exciting for us to have such a transformational impact to this industry, as you'll see as I provide you a little overview of Aireon. So I thought it'd be good just to start with the why. Why did we create Aireon? And it really gets down to a fact that very few people understood in aviation. 70% of the world prior to March 2019 when Aireon went live had full real-time surveillance of aircraft operating in it. I mean think about that. When you were flying to Europe or over to Asia, only the pilot really knew where you were. Maybe you knew roughly based on the seatback map, but air traffic control knew maybe where you were 10 minutes ago. It wasn't real-time surveillance, and that created a number of issues in terms of keeping airplanes apart to maintain that safety. But that's where Aireon came in. We saw an opportunity to fill that gap and really piggyback on the fact that Iridium was re-upping its network. It was launching its whole brand-new network of satellites that allowed us to put a capability into that network that could see all of those aircraft. So back in 2012, we started raising capital for this. We announced the partnership with NAV CANADA, that's the private air traffic control company of Canada, to invest in the Aireon as a partnership with Iridium. Over time, 4 additional air traffic control companies around the world invested in -- a total of $360 million in Aireon to really allow us to build all these payloads that went on the Iridium NEXT satellites, support the launch, and of course, in March of 2019, we were able to turn the system on and go live, providing full 100% air traffic surveillance. Now let's talk a little bit about the what. What is the technology behind Aireon, and it's a technology called space-based ADS-B. ADS-B is -- stands for Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast. Quite a mouthful itself, doesn't really mean a lot to most people, but to aviation, it means an upgrade to aircraft surveillance technology. It's going from World War II radar technology to state-of-the-art GPS technology that takes the GPS system onboard the aircraft and transmits out that at a very rapid basis to ground control. Now prior to Aireon, there were towers in the U.S., in a few other countries. Countries like the U.S., Europe, Australia, Singapore, variety of countries mandated that any aircraft flying into their airspace required -- were required to have one of those transponders on board. But again, prior to Aireon, there was no system over the oceans, over major parts of South America, Africa, Asia that could pick up this. So we saw that as an opportunity. All the aircraft were going to be equipped by 2020. Iridium was launching an amazing replacement to its network, and we were able to leverage that capability of Iridium, the fact that it has global coverage, the fact that it is in low earth orbit. So you could pick up these signals from the aircraft line without making any changes to the aircraft. And then, of course, the inter-satellite links enabled us to get that data within a half a second, from an aircraft anywhere in the world to the screen of an air traffic controller. Quite amazing technology and one that really made a big impact into the world of aviation. So let's talk a little bit about the business model of Aireon. It's a relatively simple business model. We collect the data of all the world's air traffic -- commercial air traffic. We bring it back to a data processing center here in Northern Virginia. And then we sell subscriptions to that data to the world's air traffic control organizations. We call them ANSPs, air navigation service providers. But think of those -- those are the organizations that are keeping their aircraft safely apart, FAA, NAV CANADA, et cetera. We do that on a subscription basis, either a fixed fee or a per usage basis, and then they use this service to provide the safety separation services. Now safety is a very important component to this. We are part of their infrastructure. We're part of their critical aviation infrastructure. So that puts a requirement on us, a very, very high performance. We're required to be certified by each of our customers. We've obtained a pan-European and global certification from the European Aviation Safety Agency. And that puts a degree of fidelity in our business, including providing service level agreements to ensure we maintain that level of safety. A very important part of it, as I said, this has enabled us to become a critical part of the world's infrastructure. And you can see, roll the clock forward to now, we now have 49% -- over 49% of the world's airspace contracted to use our data. Over 40 countries are now in the process either of using it or deploying it globally. So as I said, we've kind of moved to this point where we're no longer an idea, we're a critical part of the world's aviation infrastructure. So why do they use Aireon? I mean very simple: safety, safety, safety. That is the critical mantra of the world's aviation industry and certainly of air traffic control. And these are examples where in our first deployments in the North Atlantic, they were able to reduce the time an aircraft was flying at the wrong altitude from 50 minutes down to less than 5 minutes. I mean major improvements in the safety parameters that they track very, very closely. One of the most important elements to the aviation industry is the efficiencies that they can get by using real-time surveillance. I mentioned before how -- when you couldn't see any of the aircraft flying around the ocean, they basically kept aircraft very, very far apart, 80 miles apart, because they couldn't see them. They couldn't be sure that there were no -- they weren't getting too close to another aircraft. But now put the clock ahead to 2019, air traffic controllers can see the airplanes. They can let them fly closer. They can let them fly their optimal trajectory. And they're now embarking on what is the holy grail of aviation, to allow an aircraft to start from an airport, go its most optimal route to its destination airport. And in the North Atlantic, they're moving off that rigid system and they're actually trialing that, what they call user preferred groups, very, very big impact, not only to fuel savings. It's 3% to 8% of fuel savings off of some of these trajectories that they can get. Also has a major impact on greenhouse gas emissions by reducing that fuel. So win-win for the whole aviation industry. And then lastly, a lot of our customers, as you saw on the last slide, are also deploying this as a replacement or a leapfrog over ground-based technology. In one fell swoop, they can cover their entire land mass as well as their oceans with full real-time surveillance without requiring any capital infrastructure, a major improvement and improvement to global safety. One what I think is a very, very clear example of how we've impacted the world of aviation. Again, because we have a view of the entire earth and all of the ADS-B equipped aircraft, we're able to provide a critical search and rescue function. This is an example of a flight of a Pilatus aircraft. It's a single-engine aircraft that was flying from the U.S. down to Australia, actually. It took off from Santa Maria, California, and it had engine failure. It radioed out the fact they had an engine failure. Of course, there was no surveillance, except for Aireon that was available at that point in time. And we were able to track that aircraft down to the sea level. And actually, if you look closely at that chart, you can see we're actually traveling -- tracking the aircraft floating in the water. The Civil Air Patrol were able to dispatch a ship in the area, were able to rescue both pilots in the middle of the ocean. I mean very, very impactful. And there's -- this is only one example. We have, in the first 2 years, have saved over 7 people and 2 dogs in this period of time. It's really an emotional component for us at Aireon because it really shows we're really having an impact. The U.S. controls a lot of airspace. They manage over 20% of the world's airspace, and they're a world leader in aviation safety. Many of you may not know, the FAA has 2 roles. One is an air navigation service provider where they provide air traffic control services. The other is a safety regulator. They not only look after U.S. aviation, but they have a global role to provide safe flight of U.S. travelers and of aircraft like the Boeing aircraft. We've been working with them in 2 ways. One is to support the role as a global aviation innovator and safety regulator. We entered into an agreement last year with them where we're providing access to our global data set and working with them to create tools to help improve the efficiency and safety of aircraft globally. One example you may have heard about is the 737 MAX area. As you may remember, back in 2019, it was the Aireon data that was used to identify that there was a consistent problem between Lion Air and the Ethiopian flight that required the grounding of the 737 MAX fleet. Most recently, under our agreement with the FAA, we're now providing them with a service that monitors every single 737 MAX aircraft and provides an update on the performance and various safety metrics that they use to ensure the safe return of flight to the 737 MAX. Of course, I mentioned the FAA has a role in managing 20% of the world's oceans, all the way down to Indonesia and the Philippines, all the way out to the middle of the Atlantic. So they're currently in the plans of their deployment for that from an operational air traffic control perspective, and they should be making some discussions and announcements on what their plans are, hopefully, in the near future. So you can see with the creation of this air traffic control safety surveillance service, we've created a real differentiated value for Aireon. I mean not only do we provide the 100% global coverage that Iridium provides to all of their customers, but we've created this very, very high fidelity data set that is a tremendous source of value, not just for our customers, their navigation service providers, but for the entire aviation industry. We've taken that data and put it into a mission-critical infrastructure. I mentioned the safety elements of it, the ability to meet very stringent service level agreements, has created a capability that we feel is very, very hard to replicate. You put this on top of the fact that we're leveraging a $3 billion investment by Iridium to deploy this infrastructure, and the fact that we have very strong committed investors who are also our customers and suppliers that make this a very, very strong business and very, very hard to recreate. So we think we're in a very good position from a value creation and competitive barriers perspective. So what does that mean to the future of Aireon? So we've created this asset, this capability to view and see all of this aircraft data, both historical and real-time. We've realized that this isn't -- this enables a whole series of additional applications, ideas to exploit this data set. We've taken that data and put it into a cloud-based environment and are now starting to create a set of tools that will help exploit that data and provide various applications for the aviation industry. Last October, we announced the launch of 3 of those tools. I'll give you a little overview of some of those. So the first product that we've put together is what we call AireonSTREAM. But think of this as a way to provide a real-time stream of the Aireon data for a variety of applications. The one most notable, of course, would be your tracking of aircraft for aircraft operations. You may have seen some announcements of our partners at FlightAware. They currently support over 4,000 aircraft for a variety of airlines through them and their partners that basically provided operational data feed on a given airline's aircraft that supports their global operations. Think of it in a different way where we can then structure a ring around an airport, 50-, 100-mile ring around an airport, and give that feed of data to that airport that shows aircraft all the way from 40,000 feet down to the surface. That provides operational efficiency to significant number of airports, majority of the airports who don't have any ground surveillance or radars in those airspace. So that's just 2 examples of how you can stream this data in a variety of ways that add value to various aviation stakeholders. Now we've got this database going even before 2019 of all aircraft movements. We obviously have a real-time stream of current aircraft movements. And this creates a database that will provide a resource for deep and analytical insights into aviation. We're taking that data and also integrating it with other data sources, for example, like flight schedules or flight plans, weather data, that will allow us to create even more information and tools around that data that are very useful to the aviation industry. I mentioned the work that we're doing with the FAA, which is a very good example of how this is used from a safety perspective. But there are other examples. One partner we're working with is creating a service to support leasing companies. And they're using this data to track your cycles and hours on aircraft that help them track the performance of their customers' use of their aircraft under leases. This goes on and on in a number of parameters that are being used in companies that are looking at how to use this data to support deep analytics. Aviation is a global industry just by its very nature. Now air traffic control until Aireon was not necessarily a global industry. It was regional. A given air traffic control organization was responsible for their area. Maybe they shared some data with their neighbors in that case, but until Aireon, there was no way to see a complete global picture of the aviation infrastructure. And this is where AireonFLOW comes in. This is a service that we're going to provide -- or that we are providing, I should say, that allows us to share data amongst the aviation stakeholders to help support the global harmonization and global efficiency of aviation. One example you may have seen recently is our partnership and agreement with EUROCONTROL, 10-year contract to provide them basically a stream of data for all aircraft inbound to the European airspace. They use that data to match the capacity and demand of their air traffic controller sectors and help guide that aircraft in to create an efficiency that is very hard to do if you don't have a global data feed. We have a similar agreement with Hong Kong. We're working with the FAA on this topic and several other of our customers to help provide them a whole new way of looking at data that's even outside of their area of use. So very, very exciting growth in our business. So with those 3 platforms and other ones that we're currently developing, we see this as a way to really expand the opportunities for Aireon across the entire aviation stakeholder base, not just air traffic control organizations, but airlines, airports, safety regulators, even financial institutions, leasing companies and insurance companies. We're very excited about the opportunities that this kind of data set creates. And as I said earlier, it's a very important component for us because we're the only ones with this type of data set and have been using in the ways it can enable these markets. So the past year has been very, very tough on the aviation industry. And with this data capability that we have, we have a bird's eye view of what's been happening in the aviation industry. And you can see from this chart the impact that the pandemic has had. And if you look at it, this is tracking what we call aircraft movements. Think of takeoff to landing is one movement. So globally, you can see in March, the bottom fell out on the aviation traffic. It's had a slow recovery. We're back about -- we've gained about 65% of the lost aircraft movement since April of last year. And you can see it's kind of stalled until the world's governments get their travel restriction requirements done. Now there's a lot of pent-up demand. You can see it in a lot of the metrics on forward bookings of airplane tickets, et cetera. I think we all want to get out of our offices, get out of our home and go to someplace else. I think we're all set to do that. But the reason I'm bringing this up is because this is just built-in growth to our business. A number of our -- many of our contracts are based on the use of number of aircraft flying through the airspace. So this just helps improve our growth opportunities on our core business. Now we've talked about the business model for Aireon the last Investors Day. We talked about the kind of prospects for Aireon. I'm really happy to say that even in the face of this global pandemic slowdown on aviation, we were able to achieve the milestone that we talked about of going cash flow positive in 2020. It really shows the resilience of this business. We're making use of the attractive rates in the financing markets to refinance the $200 million credit facility that we put in place in 2018. In 2019, we talked about an addressable market for Aireon. It's somewhere in the $700 million to $800 million range. We think that was, quite frankly, conservative now seeing the opportunities that have unfolded over the past 2 years in data analytics and other applications of the Aireon service. So we see a lot of new market opportunities and where we see a good growth potential from that perspective. So in summary, we think Aireon is positioned very well for strong continued growth. We've really, over the past 2 years, demonstrated that we are now a critical part of the global aviation infrastructure. The aviation data analytics market is a new space for us, a new opportunity in a growing space. And we think with the investments that we're making, we're going to be able to be a significant player in that marketplace. I thank you for your time. And now I'd like to introduce my colleague, Tom Fitzpatrick, the CFO of Iridium.

Good morning, everybody. I'm going to cover 5 topics with you today. First, I want to talk about our capital structure evolution and review how we've really delivered on what's been a long-standing kind of promise of a stark financial transformation at Iridium in the period post construction of Iridium NEXT. I want to reiterate what my colleagues have done this morning, our attractive prospects for accelerated growth. And I'll try and give you a little bit of more precision around what that -- exactly that means. We -- as you know, we have a strong free cash flow profile. We've demonstrated that. Accelerated growth only augments that profile. And you put that together, we think we have a meaningful capacity for shareholder returns, and I'll try to calibrate that for you a bit here as well. And then finally, I'd like to leave you with some valuation considerations that we think are appropriate. So let's go back to our last Investor Day in March of 2019 and just paint that picture. We had 5.1x leverage, down from a peak of 5.6x in March of '18. And those of you who have been around a while, remember that we had our French credit facility in place, and it had significant principal amortization. And I remember having conversations with perhaps some of you in the audience today about the principal service and made statements to you that said, look, don't worry about them when -- we will refinance this facility long before they become operative. Similarly, that French facility wouldn't have allowed us to do anything shareholder friendly. So flash forward, what did we do in December or November of 2019, we took out the French facility. We put in place a term loan B structure, very low principal amortization, sort of 1%, and allows us to do very, very covenant-light and allows us to do shareholder-friendly things. We then did a tack-on to that facility, took out the high-yield bond in February the following year. And I think it was over $22 million of pro forma interest savings as a result of those 2 activities. All the while, you see our credit metrics improving at both Moody's and Standard & Poor's. And so flash forward to January of 2021, we repriced the term loan B facility. That repricing was because of our strengthening credit profile, as you see referenced by the credit statistics. And then we announced in February a share repurchase program of some $300 million. So thus, completing that stark financial transformation we're in, we're now actually doing shareholder-friendly things. So I'm going to spend some time talking about the components of our accelerated revenue growth. And so let's just break down our revenue. We are $583 million worth of revenue. About $120 million of that is in equipment and engineering and support. And that's fine revenue. We're going to make nice margins on it. But the driver of our revenue -- or driver of our EBITDA growth is our recurring service revenue. It's about 80% of our revenues. It's $463 million. And we'll spend some time going through the components of our service revenue because there is various streams of revenue that have different prospects for growth. And so when one considers our prospects for additional or accelerated growth, we want to talk about them each individually. So let's do that. The first is our -- the easy thing of the $463 million to identify is our government service revenue. It's about $100 million, up 4% in 2020. That is contractual. It's a 7-year contract. And so when we filed that contract, so investors can easily model what our service revenue is going to do relative to the government. Commercial is a lot more complex. There's a lot more moving parts in commercial revenue. And you see that various -- highly differing rates of growth in 2020. And I want to differentiate them for you. So the biggest piece of our commercial revenue is our voice and data business. We've, for a long time, characterized that as highly defensible but slow growing. It's kind of a niche market. And for 5 years, I think we had a CAGR of about 1%. In 2020, we were down 3%, and that's COVID. We don't think about that business any differently than we have thought about it. COVID was kind of an acute impact on that business. It should get back to what it was, which was, again, highly defensible but slow growing. That business gets a shot in the arm from what Bryan talked about, which is the development or a midband offering that will -- you'll see that in that line. And so we think there's the first -- you see the points bolded in yellow there are where the accelerated growth happens from the various initiatives that we've been talking about this morning. Next is our broadband business. And so that's an 18% grower in 2020. That looks like a great growth rate. We're disappointed in that, okay? We're disappointed in that because our product is better than the competition. We know that. The channel tells us that. But the fact of matter is that you can't get on ships in COVID, and we've seen that, and it's kind of we've been hampered by that. That's not going to be the case forever. It should start on thawing out and we should start seeing improvements, and that's our expectation. Similarly, in IOT, we grew by 1%. That's been a 10% grower for a long period of time. COVID hit IoT kind of acutely in the aviation area. We have -- we're used for safety services. And I think we took something like a $4 million hit there. So that headwind abates in 2021. And we've said, we expect materially faster growth in IoT right out of the gate in 2021 just as the aviation headwind has now subsided. Again, IoT will get a shot in the arm from additional functionality of midband, and we think that, that causes acceleration there. Hosted payload was up 27%. Don't think about that as a grower going forward. That will settle out at about $47 million. That's a contractual amount from Aireon and Harris. And then other data service is about $10 million. The biggest piece of that is Satelles. Satelles is about $5 million, and we'll talk about the Satelles' prospects for growth. So let's just boil it down here into the individual components. In voice and data, you see our subscribers step back in 2020. Again, we think that's COVID. It should be a slight grower. ARPU stepped back a little bit. ARPU should be firm. And so that's why our service revenue stepped back. That's not how we model it, kind of in a steady-state kind of environment sans COVID. And again, we see prospects for accelerated growth on the back of the midband offering. In IoT, you see, notwithstanding COVID, really strong growth in personal communications. I think we posted a record in subscribers in the face of COVID last year. The driver there is personal communications. We think we are very early on in that trend, and we think that's a grower for a long period of time. The ARPU you see was down substantially, 17% year-over-year in 2020 over 2019. That is not regular way. If you see the prior rate of deceleration was about 7%, that's more like it. That's where we stay, and that's what causes us to say, well, our IoT growth is going to be up materially in 2021 over '20. And again, it accelerates on the back of midband and continued adoption of personal communications. Broadband subscribers grew to 12,000. ARPU expanded because the service offering has more data, more data availability and should be higher ARPUs, and so that's what you see there. And you see our revenues expanded, as I said, by 18%. Our hosted payload business was up year-over-year. We think it's normalized is $47 million. It's $39 million from Aireon and $8 million from Harris. Think about this as fixed contractual revenue, the ups, and think about the hosted payload really comes more from our capacity as a owner of -- a partial owner of Aireon. We expect Aireon to start paying us dividends. And we expect eventually that the dividends will be more than what we collect in our capacity as a vendor to Aireon, and that's $39 million. I think we're thinking of that in the 2025 kind of time period. We own -- we'll own 22% of Aireon pro forma for $120 million purchase of certain of our interest that Aireon expects to make that payment after they make the payment of the hosting fee that is due. We think, as Don talked about, when we originally talked about Aireon, we said we thought it was a $700 million to $800 million addressable market. With the developments in data analytics that Don has spoken about, we think that that's probably conservative. And so feeling really good about that investment and our relationship with Aireon. Similarly, Satelles, we get about $5 million out of Satelles currently. As Matt talked about, their addressable market is substantial. If they execute on their plans, that $5 million revenue that we get currently could be easily 10x that in 10 years. We own 16% of Satelles, and to the extent they execute well against their business plan, that should be a really good investment for us. Our EBITDA margins. So I'm telling the story a long time. In 2010, when we announced the construction plan for Iridium NEXT, we laid out a plan, we laid out some guidance, talked about the stark financial transformation that happened post construction. But one of the things we said when we were in 2010 and we were sitting on kind of 46% EBITDA margins, we said, when we're done this construction period, we think that our EBITDA margin is going to be around 60%. In 2020, we're 61%. So we called that pretty well, I think. And we're not done, right? There's inherent operating leverage in this business, very little variable cost to produce an incremental minute of use. As service revenues grow, which we expect they will do at an accelerating rate, EBITDA margins expand. And so that's what we think the future holds. And so let's just review our guidance. Service revenues are approximately 3%. A fundamental agenda of our meeting here today is to say we don't think we're a 3% grower. I'm going to give you a little bit more precise guidance on where we think our growth rate goes to in a minute. But for this year, we're calling it at approximately 3%. Our EBITDA, we see it between $365 million and $375 million. Cash taxes are negligible through 2023. And net leverage, we see it less than 3.5x pro forma for the full $300 million in share repurchases. Now let's talk about the capital structure evolution. And so just to reiterate Bryan's points, Matt's points about where we see accelerated growth in this business from what we see in 2021. Broadband. We think as the maritime market thaws and we can get on ships, we would do better there. We get -- we're going to introduce an aviation product. We see growth there. In midband, that's a new product that we'll introduce here this year, and there's a myriad of applications that we think accelerate our growth. IoT, we're going to expand into further verticals. And personal communications, we think we're just scratching the surface, and we're already putting up really, really -- like I said, we're setting records -- we set records on the back of this trend, which we think is very early on, it's unfolding. And so if you put that together, take a look at what our capacity for shareholder returns is, if we consider the case of 20% -- excuse me, high single-digit growth in service revenues in the period '23 through '25, that results in approximately $2 billion in capacity for shareholder returns in the period from '21 through '25. If you back -- and that's fully 40% of our market capitalization. If you even just back that down to our current run rate of service revenue growth of 3%, you still wind up with $1.5 billion or 30% of current market capitalization. Our case is the $2 billion case. That, again, relies on our service revenue growth in '23 through '25 averaging high single digits. And we -- as we consider all of the initiatives that we talked to you about this morning, we think that, that's a good estimate. And so how do you -- how should you think about capital allocation as we look into the future? So first, we will always entertain strategic investments. As we've done, we invested in Aireon. We invested in Satelles. And we made both of those investments when we really didn't have any money. We'll continue to do that. The DDK investment is an example of strategically what we think is appropriate. And we model out a pro forma acquisition, and we're all about making sure that we want to be sure that it's NPV positive at our WACC. And so that's how we think about it. We're looking at things. Matt, I think, did a good job of telling you what we're not interested in and what we're interested in. And share buybacks. We've announced the $300 million share repurchase program. We've already bought through May '19, I think, $120 million. So we've -- we're well on the way in that undertaking. And share repurchases will be on the table as we look out into the future over this period through '25. Obviously, we will undertake a repurchase if we think it's a positive NPV trade based on the intrinsic value that we calculate based on where we see our prospects. And recurring dividends are under consideration as well. We think about recurring dividends as needing to be sustained, obviously, through the next construction cycle. So with the passage of time, the ability to estimate what that cost will be gets better, right? Close you get to that, you're able to make a better estimate of that. Similarly, we talked about Aireon dividends. So Aireon dividends, to the extent they hit where they think they're going to be, would be over $39 million. Well, that then forms -- that's opportunity as we think about kind of our dividend policy and the appropriateness of dividends that we would pay. And so now let's talk about pro forma free cash flow for 2021. This is a statistic that we encourage investors to judge us by, and let's just walk through the math here. Operational EBITDA is $370 million for the year. You back off hosted payload, the timing difference between cash and book, some working capital, $45 million of CapEx this year, and we've talked about -- we think CapEx during this holiday period averaged about $40 million for the 10-year CapEx holiday. We're a little higher than that this year and next, but we think it settles down to an average of around $40 million. Net interest is $71 million, and that gets you free cash flow of $232 million. So consider that, EBITDA, which grew at 4%, yields free cash flow growth of 15%. So you see the leverage there. Also, if you consider that, a high single-digit rate of growth in service revenues that we think we average between $23 million and $25 million should result in a much higher EBITDA growth than 4%. We're putting up 4% EBITDA growth on the back of approximately 3% growth in service revenue. So the free cash flow growth, which is 15%, can only grow in lockstep with the expansion in EBITDA growth on the back of expanded service revenue growth. And so you take a look at free cash flow per share, $1.68, up 15%; free cash flow yield, 4.8%; and free cash flow conversion is 63%. Again, all of these statistics are on the back of 4% EBITDA growth, which we don't think is kind of how you should think about us based on everything we said here today. And so we think, as Matt said, we're nothing like other satellite companies. I think investors kind of believe that because if you look at our trading multiples, we're clearly different because we don't have competition from terrestrial providers. We're not commodity broadband. We don't -- we're not under pricing pressure. We don't have declining demand in our markets. We have expanding demand. We're setting records in subscriber growth. Our recurring revenue model, significant free cash flow generation, high barriers to entry and significant and growing market opportunities. We think we're much more like the satellite companies who have similar attributes to us, yet trade at a much higher multiple. And we just consider ourselves on a number of statistics versus the tower companies. Our EBITDA growth is 4% this year. We're lagging them a bit. We don't think that's our circumstance in '23 through '25. We think we're putting up much better EBITDA growth on the back of higher service revenue growth. Our EBITDA margins are 61% and expanding. Hopefully, we catch the tower companies. CapEx intensity in this -- during the CapEx holiday period, right, is 8% less than the tower companies. Free cash flow yield of 5% and free cash flow conversion is 63%. So we think we stack up very well against the tower companies based on these financial metrics. So let me just summarize. We delivered on our 2019 commitments, and I would even say, those commitments go way further back in 2019. I mean they started early in 2010, 2011, as we were -- we always said, there's going to be a stark financial transformation post completion of Iridium NEXT. We've reduced our risk profile and borrowing costs. We've greatly improved our financial flexibility. We're buying in our shares. We have $120 million of the share buybacks that we've executed to date. We think our growth prospects are excellent, and I think Bryan and Matt did a great job of articulating why we think that. And we have a capacity for some $2 billion in shareholder returns through 2025. We think we're attractively valued for the reasons that I discussed. With that, let me -- we're going to come back with the Q&A in just a minute.

Hello, everyone. Welcome back. I'm really understanding you have some questions and answers. I appreciate the time that you spent with us so far, and we're looking forward to answering some of your questions. So Ken, I know you've been compiling them already for this, right?

Yes. So by and large, so a lot of comments from the audience, a lot of great information. So thank you all. To start off with -- one audience member asked about management's thoughts on the future for growth and opportunities and if Iridium would consider adding spectrum for incremental speed and capacity beyond the current constellation.

Yes. So a question on sort of capacity. We clearly have a great spectrum position around the world. We have enough spectrum to satisfy our needs as we look forward out in the coming 10 to 15 years, certainly, the life of this constellation. But yes, as we think about the long-term future and the potential, particularly around as we get into some even broader business areas, more spectrum is a good idea. We are considering new opportunities. We're talking about that from a regulatory and other perspective, and that will be something that we would look to for the long term for the next-generation constellation and ensure we have the right spectrum position for that.

Great. And then Matt and Bryan, how does the company think about the pros and cons of collaborating with both new and existing service providers, LEO, MEO, GEO, even terrestrial partners?

I can tell you a start. We -- a few years ago, when OneWeb, prior to them going bankrupt, they were, obviously, a VSAT -- potential VSAT partner in our eyes. We didn't view them as competition. And just like we provide VSAT companion capability for Ku, some Ka, VSAT providers, we viewed that the same way. We signed an MOU that we publicized several years ago, and we would have been fully prepared to pursue that, and we might get in the future. So some of these that are obvious companies to collaborate with, we can do that in the future.

Yes. And I agree. We're -- since we don't compete much with our -- with the channel, with any of these operators, I think they all look at us in a very positive light. When there's opportunities to work together, we have a lot of discussions, very friendly discussions with some. Some of the integration is done at a level below this service operator, and that's appropriate today. Some are considering as they're looking to integrate more fully to possibly integrate whether it be safety services or portable communications and other things into their services more directly. And we are open to doing that, and we're having discussions around -- continued discussions around that. And in some ways, special projects, areas where we can service specific customers that they have or we have. The one you mentioned, though, which still -- is still to come in this industry is sort of partnering with a terrestrial industry. I came out of that world. Cellular communications, as you know, started back in the '80s, and it's sort of flat to not growing much today. And I think those terrestrial operators are looking for growth vectors. Space seems -- has been hard for a lot of them. They haven't really understood, and it's kind of broad to think about when they only cover 10% of the world that somehow the other 90% will be an opportunity. But I think that's changing right now. I think they're looking for opportunities to expand their businesses. I think that's going to be more of an intersection between space and terrestrial in the future. But it's still kind of early days because they're still not figuring out how to work with us. We got some ideas how to work with them, some of which we've kind of alluded to here.

And maybe drawing upon that answer, we also got another question about Iridium's license technology. And so our potential to have Iridium technology used in smartphones. Could -- perhaps you can discuss the prospects for that, but also any authorizations that would be required either here in the United States or even globally by regulators.

I'll take the first crack. This is sort of -- Bryan is the lead on this strategy. I'm glad to see you picked up on sort of that as a key part of our strategy going forward. As Bryan mentioned, we do think we have the unique capability of an established network of a system, and we can demonstrate today really that we could make a connection into a device, a consumer device in which we alluded to one of the biggest markets, which is smartphones, but many other consumer products and consumer services out in the future. If you are embedded into core technology, like a chip, a processor, that sort of thing, then you could see yourself in autonomous vehicles, drones, all kinds of things. But certainly, smartphone seems to be the one that is most exciting. And by the way, when we talk about that, we're not looking to necessarily be a complete smartphone connection for all things. That, to me, is something that our predecessor worked on and was unsuccessful back in the '90s. I think that's a mistake because of the difficulty and the quality of -- even from low earth orbit of making a full-blown 4G, 5G connection to do everything a phone does is incredibly difficult and, frankly, risk beyond, I think, any reasonable bound. But to make a connection where you can send information data back and forth, texting, doing WhatsApp or other kind of applications or even sending things like presents or information about apps and that sort of thing, it can be controlled and connected. And we have the capacity to do that in our network. And we don't need regulatory. I think they asked about regulatory. That's a connection using L-band, using our frequencies from space to ground. That's -- we would use our current regulatory regimen to do that, wouldn't require any approvals to do that, wouldn't require any additional ground systems to be built around the world or any other kind of infrastructure to do that. We just need to partner with the right consumer products and technologies to make that happen. And we're at the place right now with a brand-new network to be able to do that.

I'll just add, it gets back to knowing our lane, right? We know our lane in this. We're very focused on -- like I mentioned, for personal communications, translating that to smartphones, that we're focused on the messaging. When you're off the grid, we're not looking to do voice communications, we're looking to give the ability to the consumer to get that capability into their hands. And just to reiterate what Matt said, we are very well experienced of how to -- where we offer Iridium services around the globe. So we've got all the experience in the world on that.

Great. Shifting gears, maybe, Don, we had a couple inquiries for you. Clearly, Aireon has had a tremendous amount of success with government entities around the globe. When do you expect to see traction with commercial entities and what shape, way or form will that take?

Sure. I'm happy to answer that, Ken. So to some degree, as I mentioned in the presentation, we've already had substantial success with commercial entities. Through -- I mentioned our applications of flight tracking for airlines and for aircraft operators through our partnership with FlightAware, with Airbus. There are over 4,000 aircraft currently being tracked and using our data just for operational purposes, not for air traffic control, just to give an airline dispatch organization like Qatar Airways or Malaysia Airways the ability to see where their aircraft are globally. It's first time they have that information in real time. Airbus is doing analytics on the data to help them as an aircraft manufacturer. We just launched in October of last year the 3 products that start enabling more of these types of applications. So that pipeline has been growing since. So you should hear over the next 12 months some of those deals coming through and partnerships that I think will help expand the opportunities.

Great. I just want to -- I mean watching Don build this business from day 1, really, quite a while ago, when I think about it, I remember those early days. I mean we were so focused on the air traffic control and the regulated part of that business. I think it has been sort of a revelation to us certainly as Board members on that to see how you have built what you call commercial data services or CDS. That business is really kind of -- I don't know, it certainly exceeded my expectations and potential right now. And I think the fact that you have all this data and have sort of a quality reputation for services will always make that an advantage for you going forward.

Yes, I think so. It will be the go-to source for aviation data certainly on aircraft movements.

Yes.

And maybe as a follow-up on Aireon, how might you sort of qualify or quantify the benefits of more accurate location services versus pilot reported which is, I guess, a historical norm or even environmental impact of Aireon's technology?

Yes. No, it's a big difference. And this is a little bit of an arcane discussion amongst air traffic controllers. But to safely move an aircraft from point A to point B, you need navigation, you need to know where you are, you need surveillance so the air traffic controllers know where you are. And then you need communications to be able to communicate between the pilot and controller to keep them safely apart. So when you think about that, Bryan mentioned future air navigation services, the communications they provide for cockpit communications, that is the communications piece of it. So currently, this terminology called ADS-C is basically an automation of what used to be a pilot report. It used to be a pilot over the oceans getting on an HF radio, which is notoriously poor quality and calling in their location once every 15 minutes, right? You put that in perspective, 15 minutes is like 120 miles of an aircraft move. So it's a very, very big distance. Surveillance gives you real-time location of the aircraft. The air traffic controller can see where that plane is. Big issue, big importance, certainly in things like weather deviations. When you're over the Atlantic, you hit a storm, we've all experienced this, the pilot has to deviate around it. This allows them to do that very, very safely. Big difference between once every 10, 15 minutes real time.

Great. Staying on the theme of aviation, maybe, Bryan, coming back to you. One of the viewers asked with regard to Certus aviation units, will they integrate broadband with fan safety? Or will they be 2 separate terminals?

Yes. So first of all, when I mentioned there's a lot going on, it's the first and foremost for commercial transport that's seeking aviation safety services in our Certus terminal, it is that integration or inclusion of aviation safety service in Certus aviation. However, and I don't want to reveal some of the strategies of some of the other partners, you could satisfy the early safety requirements with some of our narrowband technology in that aircraft but separate from the Certus terminals. So there's -- what we're working on is making sure that we've got Iridium Certus broadband for aviation, safety certified. That's the regulatory hurdle that I talked about that we just got the interim approval for, we will get at the end of June. But there are some other options from a design perspective that they could decide to use our narrowband, which is already approved for safety services on that aircraft beforehand.

Great. And then maybe going back to Tom and to Matt, how big is the revenue opportunity with Certus as it relates to the U.S. government?

U.S. government? Certus?

Yes. We think it's $100 million, like that, is the TAM.

Yes. Government has been actually investing in upgrading their private gateway to be Certus compatible. That process should continue this year and hopefully complete this year. It looks like it's on track to do that. There's a lot of applications being considered. There is actually some government traffic on our commercial gateway today waiting for the government gateway to be ready, which would provide an even more secure path for that government customer to do it. There is a lot of L-band right now in the government. We really think we're extremely well suited for it, so does the government, I believe. And we think really in the next few years, certainly in this time frame that we've been talking about here, focused on that '23, '24, '25 time frame, I think government will really start to be picking up and will be a pretty sizable part of that towards the run rate in that out year. It always takes longer to get those applications together, but it's a -- they're doing, I think, often as much as several hundred million dollars at a time of L-band broadband. And so there's certainly opportunity for us to be able to do like that kind of amount of revenue is very possible for us.

Okay. Great. And then with regard to midband, which is clearly a key service that will be rolled out this year, how is Iridium thinking about ARPUs from midband? And then I would probably add, how does Iridium think about ARPUs in general?

I'll start with the first and then leave it to others to add. But so for midband, like I mentioned, it's obviously an open territory for us, as I described. But as it relates to ARPU, it really gets back to the end users' requirements, right, where narrowband doesn't fit right and neither does broadband. But if you were to look at midband ARPUs, yes, they will be higher than the narrowband ARPUs that we enjoy today. Now in different applications, they might be slightly different, but the intent is obviously that midband ARPUs will be higher than the narrowband.

And then they'll be accretive. So if we talk about the segments that they're going to impact, right, in our voice and data business, right, we average $40, $41 right now. You layer on midband functionality, the higher data speeds, that's going to be accretive to that ARPU. In IoT, our ARPUs have been sliding, not for a bad reason, for a good reason because we're just adding significant numbers of personal communications devices, and they have a lower ARPU. While you add midband functionality to IoT, that's going to fight that trend, right? And so that will be accretive to our IoT ARPUs.

And just more broadly, how do we think about ARPUs? I mean there may be still some investors online watching this that haven't heard us talk about this. But in terms of average revenue per unit, a measure that the terrestrial industry has used along the way to try to discuss the value of a customer, it means a little less to us in the satellite business because we have a fixed cost infrastructure. So incremental dollars almost completely fall to the bottom line. So I'm very happy to get loss of $5 customers. I'd love to get them to be $50 customers or $100 or even $500 customers in a broadband case. But since the revenue falls to the bottom line, I'm much more interested in what resources they're using in my network and is that appropriate to what they're doing. And these small IoT consumer devices are almost using nothing of my network. And so the fact that they're contributing is a positive. That's not usually true in the terrestrial industry where you have to put a lot of capital into base stations to support more capacity and usually having to build out a lot of stuff, you have to subsidize devices to even put customers on your network. And in those cases, ARPU becomes a critical measure because when it falls, you could be in real trouble and upside down in your capital structure. That's not really our issue. We've kind of forecast over time falling ARPUs but growing volumes. And with a nice, smooth use of our network, that's a really sustainable business model.

I would say the variable cost of the network as well as cost to acquire. I mean that's -- we have no cost to acquire. So we acquire a new personal communications sub, cost us nothing to acquire that sub.

Well, Bryan's team would disagree because they spend a lot of time bringing in all those partners and everything here. But no, there's -- yes, just picking up for you here. But no, they're obviously bringing a partner on and getting them ready to go and stuff is a small part of our business. Once they get going, there are really no incremental costs. And those customers just build in service revenue.

Yes. So Tom, maybe staying with you. We had a question about net leverage. And so maybe if you reiterate our guidance. But also, is there an optimal level that Iridium seeks to get to in light of its share repurchase and other activities?

So our stated leverage guide is between 2.5 and 3.5x leverage. So we like it in that range. That's where we could see as optimal between those 2 kind of goalposts. And I would say our share repurchase program was configured with that in mind. We wanted to get inside the high end of that target range. And so the $300 million repurchase enables us to do that as we exit 2022.

Okay. And then more broadly, I guess, speaking about the ecosystem of partners. Can Iridium discuss its reliance on its largest partners? There's generally an 80-20 rule in most businesses. And the question will welcome any comments you want to share on revenue or subscribers contributed, but also leveraging that, what the impact of disruptions in the industry like Speedcast and Marlink, what does that mean for Iridium's business?

I'll start, and then I think you should pick up a little bit on that last part here, too. But overall, I mean, as I said, we have 500 partners. There are some that we talk about a little bit more often because of the volume of devices that they're putting on the network. Certainly, the U.S. government, for example, has always been an important customer as one of our first customers. But none of them are so substantial that they really affect our business one way or the other dramatically. And if I looked at the top 5 partners from 5 years ago and the top 5 partners now, I think it's really evolved quite a bit over that time. And I'm expecting in 5 years during this industry that there are going to be some very different names on the top of that, too, with the partners that we're recruiting today and the industries we're getting involved in and the business prospects that we see. So I doubt that anything is really going to change at this point. We're too big for that. But I am really, really pleased when we get a really important strategic partner. And then we evolve with them to provide them more technology, perhaps work with them on special technologies that can deploy that. I just love the fact that they don't move on from us. Once we acquire a partner, they're really happy to stay with us. They love what we're doing with the network. They love the technology, and it's more about recruiting and bringing on more, right? So...

Yes. So just to build on that. So when I look at the -- as Matt said, he looks at the daily metrics every day, is that the breadth and depth of our partners and who contributes is much different than what it looked probably when I first got here. I'm very encouraged by the breadth and depth. I use a lot of sports analogies, but unlike an NFL team, I don't have a cap on the roster, right? So it's up to me to how many solid contributing partners I can add and recruit the right ones and develop the right ones. And I think we're doing a pretty good job at that. So I think that's -- I'm pretty comfortable with where we stand, as comfortable as you can get in this business, but it's all about bringing those partners in that can contribute. And I think we've done that pretty well in the past.

I think I'm reading a little bit more on the question too because it mentioned Marlink and Speedcast. I mean there might be a little bit more about the -- Marlink rumored, I think, as you said, maybe was up for sale. Nobody in our maritime infrastructure or handset infrastructure really has market power over all the others in some cases. So there's not really much that could happen there that would affect us dramatically. I don't really see that, that's likely because I think we have many, many other partners, and it's a very competitive dynamic that we work within right now. There's a lot, a lot of distributors around the world that work underneath them. And so that moves around. But I'm pretty confident that those are going to be partners for a long, long time. Speedcast, in particular, was a speed bump, no pun intended. They were a large service provider. But again, we have lots and lots of service providers in that space, and I'm really pleased to see them coming out with their strategy and only focusing even more, which I think will be great. And I really don't see a whole lot of vertical integration really kind of affecting our business that much of other players here. So...

Okay. And perhaps staying in the maritime vertical. A clarifying question as to a slide that was shown about having 5% market share today and growing to about 10% to 15% was that volume or revenue. And as a tack-on to that question, how does Iridium's position compared to VSAT and potential price competition at the upper side of the L-band?

So I'll start with the second one. So our intent is not to compete with VSAT. Go back to our lane. We know our lane. We've got sort of 700 speeds that serve us very well to compare -- to compete with Inmarsat. And as VSAT grows, there's a draft for us off of that, right? We're going to -- as being the -- what I call the de facto standard for VSAT, as that grows, we're going to grow. And also don't dismiss the sentiment by the partners that they view Inmarsat as the competition, and that will continue. As far as the market share slide goes, I believe that the 10% to 15% you're referencing, if I remember the question right, that was -- I mentioned that top line, I had us growing from about 12,000 Iridium connected vessels to 21,000. Right now, we're about 5% market share, less than -- or 5% growing to 10% to 15%. I believe it was on the revenue, but I'll clarify that.

Yes, it was revenue.

Right. I know because we gave it to him. His goal is a lot higher than that, of course, here too as he -- just to make sure he sweats appropriately. But I really do think that the opportunity there isn't about speed, though. I think you can see in our strategy. Bryan talked about focusing back on midband because I know others are saying, well, we can go even faster in L-band and we can provide a 1.5 megabit or a couple of megabit. Well, then you're just competing with Ka and Ku-band with another technology. And I'm not totally sure you're really accomplishing quite as much. I mean our goal isn't to go up and do what Ka and Kus do, but to augment and support them. And by the way, every expectations we've set here today about what we think the next 5 years are about with the expectations that Ka and Ku-band are going to continue to expand, commoditize, move downstream. We really think that our opportunities is still within that realm of what L-band is an important aspect to do and what we specifically can do within L-band.

Great. So maybe following up on that. How does Iridium gauge milestones, especially with the midband rollout? What hurdles do we still have to overcome in front of us?

I'll just start. So obviously, we are very focused right now on making sure that -- like I talked about, the Certus broadband launch, we are going to make sure that we're working to deliver a quality service, which we will. We're going through the development, the testing and the trialing, and that's actively underway right now with our VAM partners. I also mentioned that there are a lot more engagements that we're involved with. And it really is to expand that ecosystem across those use cases. I only pulled a couple, right, from UAVs and the mobile banking. There are many more, and that is the power of our ecosystem, right? We create -- we say we create services no one else can. It's our partners that are creating services that no one else can. We're providing enabling technology. We're providing the network, but it's that ecosystem of market knowledge, technical knowledge, geographic knowledge that they bring to the table. There's a term I overuse, secret sauce, but it's relevant.

By the way, midband is technically available today as a module in our 9770, but we have 3 other modules in various stages of development that offer different ranges and sizes to be able to shrink things down and expand things up so that we cover the range. But the challenge is a little bit more in narrowband kind of IoT and communications. You're sending back some points of things back and forth, but once you start getting into providing a little bit more speed, up to 100 kilobits per second, you're really talking -- you enable a lot of things, but you're also making a bit more of a complicated product and you're in a more complicated application. So fortunately, we're working with lots of partners who know this space very well. And our first -- 20, 30, 40 of them right now look like they really have very clear visions about what they want to address, but I think it's going to expand way beyond that. And milestones, it's more -- I'm sure we'll be clicking off how many partners have adopted the technology, how many applications and solutions they put in the speed, how many have been deployed. Those are all things we'll report about in the future as this midband market kind of develops. But we're -- we like what we see so far in sort of the first year.

Great. And then maybe keeping with that theme. As it relates to, I guess, end user products as well as modules, does Iridium have its own factories, how are those manufactured? And then how do you think about R&D spending ongoing?

Yes. So we outsource the manufacturing of our modules to an outsourced manufacturing firm that we -- I have an incredible supply chain team, and Suzi's operation staff has really got that running extremely well end-to-end. She is responsible for all the R&D development, both in-house and outsourced, and the management and processes, all the way through to the development of those new modules and then the production of them and the shipping of them and the customer support and all that sort of thing. And that's a very efficient operation after 20 years, as you might imagine, and really pleased at where that's come from. We do spend R&D. Bryan, in particular, directs that activity, his team, through product management, R&D activities, creates specifications and that goes into requirements, which goes into products. We have a very robust portfolio of things underway right now, which -- including almost a complete re-architecture of our network to really mine a lot of capacity and speed out of our system as well as those new modules and new service capabilities. And so it's sort of an end-to-end process. And I know we don't speak a lot of that because, frankly, after all this time, we're just good at doing that right now, and it's more about delivering the services modules through more partners and getting that business model.

Yes. I think touching upon that, we've received 2 questions to talk about the acceleration of revenues, 2022 and then 2023, perhaps taken another step-up. Can you talk about sort of the maturity of that curve and why it takes time for new products to gain traction?

Well, really, remember, we just launched Certus, I mean, got into broadband for the first time, only less than 2 years ago. I mean -- and really, midband is only coming about right now. And we've only have maritime in land mobile in the first instances of coming in there. And now we're filling in with other speed products with Certus 100 and 200 with midband. Moving into aviation, really excited about all the partners involved in that. It obviously takes time to develop a business. And then, by the way, there's this global pandemic that happened during all that time, which, frankly, I think we managed to very well and became, in the biggest scheme, sort of a blip to us here. But that did slow down a couple of our industries and some things -- and our partners has slowed down a little bit, though I think they're kind of getting back to a full steam ahead right now. So it takes time, but I think it's more about -- if you look at comparables and stuff, I think you're going to see us build into 2022 and then the real focus here on the kind of rates that Tom is talking about, '23 through '25. I think that's an appropriate way of thinking about our growth acceleration.

Great. And maybe this is good for a concluding question, but that is, are there any announcements or evolutions with existing partners that you all want to announce on today's call?

Sure. We just decided to keep that behind right now for just this moment to tell you if you've been staying with us. But obviously, keep watching. We have a lot of things happening even this year in terms of partner and product announcements. And I think it's going to be an exciting future, as we said. I hope if that's the concluding question, no, I'm not going to give you any secret announcements today, but maybe this is a good time.

These are real questions.

Anyway, thank you, Ken, for really pulling this all together and bringing us together. Thank you all for watching. I hope this has been helpful for you in understanding. We don't get this opportunity to really dig in this deep and really look out in the future and talk about our opportunities. Thanks to my incredible team and those who, by the way, couldn't join us, but they and the incredible staff at Iridium, I'm obviously honored to work with every day. And thank you to the marketing and technology team for putting all this together. Obviously, this was -- it was nice to be in the office together talking about something we are very passionate about and are excited about the future. So thanks. We're always available for questions. You know Ken's number. You have our information. We're glad to talk to you individually about anything we've said before. And of course, we'll be seeing you on future quarterly earnings calls and until we meet again, hopefully, physically and in person at maybe another Investor Day or someplace else. So thanks very much. Thanks all team, and take care.