Look who's bailed out internet-satellite provider Intelsat? It's... Softbank? Softbank has arrived as the unlikely white knight to save Luxembourg-based internet-satellite provider Intelsat from running out of cash. It has injected debt funding and proposed a merger through its LEO satellite firm OneWeb. Now bondholders for Intelsat must give the deal the go-ahead. The deal came just as Intelsat …
You mean it will cost $15Bn to deploy, fail to deliver a service as good a regular cell phone, go bankrupt and finally start to make a profit when it's bought by another company for 10-20% of it's original cost and does a deal to let the USG block buy a chunk of its capacity.
I think most investors will hope it will do rather better than that.
Because a deal is big does not make it clever.
IS this that same, original intelsat? The people who did the first geostationary satellites? Little surprised they seem to be a private company who can get into financial strife, I kinda assumed that governments would have a hefty interest in them, and just write a cheque if they need more money.
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Here in Blighty our big company in the satellite comms business, Inmarsat, has taken something of a hammering of late: share price down 30% over about a year. But the real woe was with smaller player Avanti, which only recently organised a bailout with bondholders accepting a debt-for-equity swap, and whose long-term shareholders have lost around 95%.
A whole sector under pressure. Cheap pickings for someone looking to splurge cash. That might indeed catch the eye of private equity somewhere, but it argues that AN Other satellite operator is less likely to be in a position to make a bid.
Founded 1991
Went Chp11 in 2003.
And checking further still Orbcomm went Chp11 in 2000.
So of the 3 LEO satellite constellations launched all were radically restructured following bankruptcy. Not exactly a good sign. You'd kind of expect at least one would have come good and delivered its promises to its original investors.
Now perhaps OneWeb has some Special Sauce (TM Andrew Orlowski) in its business model that will allow it to sidestep the issues they all had. A different target market that will accept their pricing and what they can deliver.
Promoters of new tech like to insist their stuff is nothing like the old stuff and won't suffer the same problems. As always time will tell if they are right.
And WTF has happend to Wikipedia.
It looks like it's developed a lisp.
The 'T' is capitalized. The company's name is assembled from International Telecommunications Satellite Network. It has nothing to do with the silicon company or spies. It was originally built to relay analog phone lines overseas and over long distances where copper was impractical.
Only obsolete for stationary systems (Of course it is still quite useful if a ship drags its anchor across a fiber link and severs it).
But it is quite useful for communication with ships, aircraft, and people that are in areas that a fiber link wouldn't handle. InMarSat is currently working with the aviation industry to start streaming the CVR / CDR (Black Box) data live from all aircraft to a ground station to avoid something like MH-370. Same story with ships.
There are also plenty of people (such as myself) that work in areas where even copper doesn't reach. Its also useful for personal and vehicle emergency beacons or just remote data logging from remote experiments (such as volcano and Tsunami warning systems).
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