With a combined revenue of $21 trillion and $2.1 trillion in profits, the 2026 Fortune 500 is the definitive list of America's largest companies.

Fortune 500

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This year's Fortune 500 marks the 65th running of the list.

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This year's Fortune 500 marks the 61st running of the list. Wal-Mart claims the top spot again. See who made the list.

Wal-Mart stayed on top as its sales crept closer to half-a-trillion dollars. Apple moved into the top five. And UnitedHealth Group continued its steady climb. 

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EchoStar Corporation is a provider of satellite communication, TV, internet, and mobile phone services. It was founded in 1980 by Charlie Ergen, Candy Ergen, and Jim DeFranco as a C-band satellite dish distributor. Since then, it has grown to acquire the Dish, Sling TV, Boost Mobile, Hughes, Hughesnet, and Jupiter brands in the U.S., Australia, and Europe. The company claims to have invented the first consumer TV digital video recorder. In addition to consumer television and phone service, the company serves other telecommunications providers, aeronautical services, and civilian and defense government agencies on an enterprise basis.

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Q4 2025

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Q3 2024

EchoStar (SATS): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

legacy

EchoStar

echostar

Greetings, and welcome to the EchoStar Corporation's Fourth Quarter and Year End twenty twenty four Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants will be in listen only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded.

It is now my pleasure to introduce Dean Manson, Chief Legal Officer. Dean, you may now begin.

Thank you, Rob, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to EchoStar's fourth quarter and full year twenty twenty four earnings call. We will begin with opening remarks from Hamid Aqavan, President and CEO followed by Paul Orban, EVP and Principal Financial Officer Gary Shandman, EVP and Group President of Video Services John Swearinga, President of Technology and COO and Paul Gaski, COO for Hughes. We request that any participant producing a report not identify other participants or their firms in such reports. We also do not allow audio recording, which we ask that you respect.

All statements we make during this call, other than statements of historical fact, constitute forward looking statements made pursuant to the Safe Harbor provided by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause our actual results to be materially different from historical results and from any future results expressed or implied by the forward looking statements. For a list of those factors and risks, please refer to our annual report on Form 10 K for the year ended 12/31/2024, filed today, February 27, and our subsequent filings made with the SEC. All cautionary statements we make during the call should be understood as being applicable to any forward looking statements we make wherever they appear. You should carefully consider the risks described in our reports and should not place any undue reliance on any forward looking statements.

We assume no responsibility for updating any forward looking statements. We refer to OIBDA and free cash flow during this call. The comparable GAAP measure and a reconciliation for OIBDA is presented in our earnings release and in the case of free cash flow in our 10 K. With that, I'll turn it over to Hamid.

Thank you, Dean. Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. This past year marked the beginning of a transformation for EchoStar as we continue to strengthen our business to compete at a larger scale in the global telecommunications market. At the beginning of 2024, we brought two great companies together, EchoStar and DISH Network.

The merger combined DISH Network satellite technology, video services, retail wireless business and nationwide terrestrial five gs network with EchoStar's premier satellite communications, enterprise go to market capabilities and U. S. Based manufacturing, creating one company with the broadest portfolio of assets in the telecom, media and space verticals. Integrating and leveraging these valuable assets allows us to provide unique solutions like direct mobile phone to satellite connectivity under one entity. Over the past year, we enacted a plan to improve our capital structure, leverage synergies across business units, reset Boost Mobile, continue to expand and optimize Boost's state of the art Open RAN five gs wireless network and drive value for our shareholders.

I'm pleased with the dedication and resiliency of our teams in executing against this plan and managing costs across the board to create shareholder value. As for our operating results, the Pay TV segment improved over prior year results on most key metrics, including churn, ARPU and SAC. Our Hughes business includes both HughesNet, our consumer brand and the Hughes Enterprise business. Among other assets, both leverage the most sophisticated commercial satellite in the world, JUPITER three, which delivers more than 500 gigabits per second of broadband capacity. As we increased our focus on the enterprise market, teams work to make further inroads with in flight aviation products and services, DoD contracts and growth in our managed services arm for which we were named for the second year in a row, a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant.

Boost Mobile made steady progress throughout the year. Excluding the impact of ACP, our efforts resulted in consecutive quarter over quarter net positive subscriber growth since Q1 of twenty twenty four. Boost Mobile also saw improved churn and achieved significant lift in ARPU. These gains are a bellwether of things to come. We continue to enhance our network and met our 80% FCC coverage commitments by the end of the year.

In addition, Boost Mobile Network was recognized last month as the number one mobile network in New York City by a third party industry benchmarking expert. This is a testament to the hard work of our network engineering teams and the excellence of our technical infrastructure. Drawing upon two of our exceptional assets, EchoStar is uniquely positioned as both a satellite and mobile service provider to develop solutions with a global impact. Our portfolio of products and our unique spectrum assets put us in the advantageous position to offer such solutions as direct satellite to device connectivity, a service we have in operation since 2023 through partners in certain international markets. We are already hard at work on the most capable offering of this technology and we look forward to keeping you updated on our progress in this exciting space.

Collectively, for the year, we made progress towards our goals while realigning the business, addressing financial needs and establishing a firm foundation. For 2025, we are focused on maximizing the use of our available resources to gain market share and accelerate value creation. Now, I would like to turn it over to Paul Orban for commentary and color on the numbers.

of the fourth quarter, our total cash and marketable securities was $5,700,000,000 reflecting an increase of $3,000,000,000 compared to the prior quarter. This improvement was primarily driven by a series of financing transactions that raised $5,600,000,000 in net proceeds, partially offset excuse me, partially offset by the repayment of approximately $2,000,000,000 of DISH DBS senior notes in November. In addition, we recognized a $689,000,000 gain on debt extinguishment from the successful exchange of $4,700,000,000 of our convertible notes and extended those maturities to 2,030. Athelstar generated positive operating free cash flow in 2024, defined as free cash flow before debt service payments and non operating CapEx, which was in line with our expectations. Looking to 2025, we expect to maintain positive operating free cash flow as we remain disciplined in managing our operating cost structure while continuing to grow our wireless business.

Free cash flow, including debt service in 2024 was a negative $1,200,000,000 That's an improvement of approximately $500,000,000 compared to the prior year. We reduced CapEx excluding capitalized interest by over 50% in twenty twenty four billion dollars to $1,500,000,000 which is in line with our prior guidance. We expect CapEx will decline in 2025 as our FCC build out deadlines were extended. Now let's review our financial performance for the fourth quarter and for the full year of 2024. Revenue was approximately $4,000,000,000 in the fourth quarter, down 5% year over year, primarily due to fewer subscribers at Pay TV and Hughes compared to the prior year.

OIBDA was $397,000,000 in the fourth quarter, an increase of $9,000,000 year over year adjusted for the 2023 non cash asset impairment charge. This improvement was driven by more efficient Boost mobile marketing, partially offset by a slight decline in pay TV OIBDA due to fewer subscribers. For the full year of 2024, consolidated revenue was $15,800,000,000 that's down 7% year over year due to subscriber declines in each of our segments. OIBDA was $1,600,000,000 in 2024, down from $2,100,000,000 in 2023 when excluding last year's non cash impairment charges. The reduction in OIBDA was driven by lower average subscribers and higher wireless network spend, partially offset by a reduction in SAC and cost savings from G and A.

Lastly, I'd like to provide a brief update on our segment reporting structure. Historically, we have reported four segments: Pay TV, retail wireless, five gs network deployment and broadband and satellite services. To align with how we view and manage the business, we combined the retail wireless and five gs network deployment segments into a single segment now called wireless. This change reflects a more integrated approach to how we operate and manage these businesses and is in line with industry practices. With that, I'd like to turn it over to Gary to discuss Video Services.

Thanks, Paul. In Q4 and throughout 2024, our pay TV businesses fared well, despite industry headwinds. In 2024, we achieved a year over year ARPU increase of 4.2% across pay TV. Our cost optimization work continues and we yielded year over year SG and A and variable cost savings and these efforts drove substantial increases in OIBDA per sub growth versus the prior year. Across both services, we also leveraged our native proprietary AI and ML capabilities to better identify, attract and retain quality customers, leading to a reduced marketing stack and significant churn reductions.

For DISH TV, we finished the year with approximately 5,700,000 subscribers with twenty twenty four churn at 1.46%, a 23 basis point improvement versus last year. SAC per activation also improved 10.5% year over year driven by increased marketing efficiencies. Our lower year over year churn is really attributable to our data driven retention efforts, our improved DISH TV Hopper UX that we launched, our bundled Netflix offer for DISH TV customers and our lack of programmer blackouts. We also drove incremental ARPU via the introduction of our disconnected sets out box programmatic advertising capability last year. On the Sling side, we finished the year with approximately 2,100,000 subscribers, a year over year increase of almost 40,000 customers.

We saw a churn improvement of 141 basis points year over year. That's our lowest level since the pandemic and lower year over year SAC and increased our marketing ROI. In 2024, on Sling, we launched many new product features, including Free Stream DVR, Arcade and our Rewards program. And late in Q4, we launched our Unlimited Storage DVR and our Replay feature, which provides consumers with unparalleled access to the best of live TV on their own schedule. These differentiated product features and our focus on quality resulted in twenty one straight months of viewership growth and extended our lead in live TV streaming quality.

We are especially proud that we were recognized as the best live TV streaming service by both U. S. News and World Report and Tom's Guide and we're well positioned for 2025. Our main focus in 2025 is to better integrate and cross sell our products with the Boost Mobile and Hughes product portfolios. Our first effort is the recent launch of Sling within our Boost Mobile app, providing our wireless customers added value with free content and we'll continue to more deeply integrate our content experiences into Boost Mobile to help support wireless growth.

I'll now turn it over to Paul Gaskey, who will cover Broadband and Satellite Services.

Thank you, Gary. Our Broadband and Satellite Services segment operates in the consumer, enterprise, aero and government markets. Our HughesNet consumer business continues to add subscribers on our JUPITER three satellite, offering affordable high speed unlimited data service plans to new customers, while simultaneously providing high value upgrades to existing customers. We closed 2024 with approximately 880,000 subscribers. Our satisfaction surveys continue to show that customers like our new plans confirming that our Jupiter three satellite and platform are delivering a quality experience.

Our focus remains as in previous quarters on acquiring and retaining high value customers for HughesNet. Our North American Enterprise managed services business signed several major contracts to upgrade network infrastructure, provide managed Wi Fi access, offer network management and launch our latest cybersecurity services. Hughes was selected over larger competitors because of our superior support and service offerings. Additionally, our Hughes managed LEO business has now shipped over 15,000 Hughes manufactured user terminals. Feedback from our customers continues to be very positive.

Our in flight connectivity business signed an expanded contract with Delta Airlines to provide in flight connectivity for future new deliveries of select A350 and A321neo aircraft. This expanded contract features the Hughes Fusion multi orbit in flight connectivity solution, an industry first technology tailored for commercial aviation that simultaneously blends LEO and GEO satellite capacity at Ka and Ku frequency bands. The multi orbit and multi band capability allows Delta to utilize worldwide capacity to deliver an industry leading passenger experience. Our unique network architecture for in flight connectivity is experiencing increased interest from airlines around the world. In our government and defense business, we continue to execute on our contracts with the DoD for five gs Open RAN networks and DoD installations with the U.

S. Navy at Whitby Island and Hawaii, as well as with the U. S. Army at Fort Bliss, Texas. These awards add to the growing number of U.

S. Military installations with the capabilities Hughes can provide, including program and network management alongside Boost Mobile's leading edge five gs technology and network. In 2024, Hughes was the only satellite connectivity and telecom business recognized as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for managed network services. This is the second year in a row for Hughes to win this award, which is a testament to our ability to deliver cutting edge secure network services. Additionally, Hughes was also named the 2024 Managed Security Service Provider of the Year by Cybersecurity Breakthrough.

The award recognized Hughes as a leader in providing businesses of all sizes with managed network and security solutions. Our international managed services business recently earned several multimillion dollar contracts in India and Brazil, providing connectivity for more than 3,000 schools and multiple energy companies. Increasingly, international business customers are selecting Hughes for managed services in addition to capacity. Globally, we see continued interest in our Jupiter Ground system with new contracts expected throughout 2025. With that, I will turn it back to Hamed for an update on Boost Mobile.

Thank you, Paul. Regarding Boost Mobile, we make significant progress in 2024 toward our goals of optimizing marketing and acquisition techniques, simplified and differentiated consumer offers and a strengthening device parity, all while increasing un net usage to take advantage of owner economics. The new Boost Mobile has made steady progress since its launch mid year with a host of prepaid and postpaid plans under one cohesive brand. We also launched differentiated offerings like the one free year of service with the purchase of a qualified device and a thirty day money back guarantee risk free. Strengthening product parity was an important objective for us this year.

Through the introduction of more devices that are compatible with Boost mobile network, our product portfolio continues to expand allowing for increased customer profitability. Additionally, we increased our distribution through an expanded relationship with Apple with customers now able to purchase and activate Boost Mobile service through Apple retail channels alongside the nationwide incumbents. We plan to further invest and grow our distribution footprint in 2025. Excluding the impact of ACP, our efforts resulted in consecutive quarter over quarter net positive subscriber growth since the first quarter of twenty twenty four. We finished 2024 with approximately 7,000,000 wireless subscribers with a growth of 90,000 net subscribers in the fourth quarter.

In addition to these promising subscriber trends, Boost Mobile is acquiring higher quality customers as evidenced by our 28% improvement in churn year over year, an increase in take rates for AutoPay and the highest ARPU across the wireless prepaid market. We will continue to build up on this momentum, capitalize on operational improvements and leverage our new go to market approach in 2025. Let me now hand the call to John to cover our network deployment progress.

Thank you, Hamid. We are the world leader in developing and operationalizing a cloud native Open RAN five gs network. In 2024, we further expanded our leadership and innovation in this space as we've proven our American led Open RAN architecture provides competitive wireless services for consumers and businesses. Our software defined scalable architecture allows us to continually improve the performance and efficiency of our network and rapidly deploy new solutions. Additionally, our Boost Mobile network architecture is well positioned to support GenAI use cases and workloads.

In 2024, we invested $1,100,000,000 in CapEx for network deployment, in addition to the $2,600,000,000 in 2023, and continue to be disciplined in our approach as we transition from building our network to running, optimizing and monetizing it. During the fourth quarter, we met our latest FCC milestone by extending our five gs broadband coverage to over 80% of Americans, which is more than two sixty eight million people. With this achievement, we now have over 23,000 sites on air. We also added to our five gs voice coverage, now offering Bonner to more than two twenty million Americans in over 100 markets with successful network launches in Boston, Seattle and Pittsburgh. We've already deployed 3GPP Release 17 across our network and we're well on our way to achieving 24,000 sites on air by 06/14/2025, in alignment with our new FCC framework, which allows us to more efficiently build out our network and increase competition in highly populated areas.

Along with the expansion of our network, we are also observing increasingly competitive network performance metrics. And in many markets, our network is already outperforming our competitors. Recently, the Boost Mobile Network was awarded by a key third party benchmark survey, the best overall mobile network in New York City. And we anticipate highlighting more head to head wins in the future. In regard to our on net customers, they received pure five gs on the Boost mobile network and have extended coverage through our network partnerships with wireless coverage totaling 99% of The U.

S. Today, we have over 1,000,000 customers on net and are loading more than 75% of compatible devices on our network in the accelerated markets. As Sameed mentioned earlier, we are focused on activating a growing percentage of new customers directly onto our network, as well as upgrading existing customers to Boost Mobile network compatible devices. This will continue to be a key priority as we work to further leverage owner economics. For 2025, we plan to continue optimizing the Boost Mobile network and increasing our networks footprint based on consumer needs and in accordance with meeting our FCC milestones.

Additionally, we look forward to working with the FCC to increase CBRS power levels, a key step towards improving spectral efficiency, increased utilization of this band and aligning The U. S. With the rest of the world. Now, I'd like to turn it back to Hamid for a few short closing comments.

Thank you, John. Based on the momentum of 2024, we have a good starting point for the current year. EchoStar is positioned to deliver further operational improvements in 2025. We will continue to run our business with fiscal and operational discipline and focus on value creation by serving our customers with exceptional experiences. With that, we will open it for Q and A from the analyst community.

Thank The first question today is from the line of Ric Prentiss with Raymond James. Please proceed with your questions.

quick questions. Appreciate the details, particularly in the five gs network, 23,000 sites on air heading to 25,000 by the June 25 deadline. Is there a number out there as far as what you want to hit the year end '26 extended deadlines?

Thank you for the question, Rick. John, would you like to take that question?

Yes. Hi, Rick. Thanks for the questions. Just to correct one thing you said, it's 24,000 sites on air by June 14 this year is what's required under the new FCC framework. But we're in 2025.

We're obviously focused on hitting the commitments that we've made. As we look to the future, obviously, we'll be back into construction mode. We have to put sites on air to hit our future deadlines. And we're not really sharing numbers on exactly the number of sites that we would have. I think some of that's going to be success based.

A good amount of the work that we're doing is driven by customer experience in the major markets where we operate in addition to what our FCC requirements are. So I think we're going to try to value steer our deployment capital towards the right outcomes based upon how, among other things, Boost Mobile business is doing at a market level. So obviously, we'll try to provide some trail markers as we go, but we're not going to give concrete numbers on year end on-site numbers. And the extent that we don't have from FCC's commitments around those things that implicate the licenses, it's not a metric we'll look to overly share obviously as we're looking to compete.

Okay. On the Boost Mobile side, speaking of which, it sounds like a lot of cross selling then from the video side to the Boost side. Should we think of this kind of all what we've seen with the cable operators kind of as they try and bundle things together? And what kind of stowing a share of gross adds should we think boost is targeting if I'm right about that kind of bundling video and mobile together?

Rick, thanks for the question. Listen, we have just begun honestly, just begun scratching the surface of what we can bundle. We are already cross bundling our pay TV business with The EU's consumer connectivity business. That's something we have been doing through the year and very good results. We're happy with what's there.

We have integrated Sling service inside of our mobile app already on Boost mobile app. So some of these things are already seeing early indications that usage and adaptation by the customers is increasing. But I don't want to set any expectation that this is part of the growth plan we have for the year. This is part of the things that we develop in this year. I think you will see the result of this clearly.

As I mentioned, we are uniquely positioned with three or four different assets nobody else in our immediate industries have. We have satellite connectivity. We have content, a great content experience. We do have a great five gs and cloud based experience. We're just beginning to get to the point where we tie these things together.

We talk about an example of direct to satellite. I think 2025 for us should be a year. There's some of these things become very tangible in terms of market offerings where most of these things under development. You're going to hear from us as the year goes on. I think the mobile companies have I'm sorry, the cable companies have been doing that to some degree.

They're selling their broadband connectivity with content. We think that's in the market. We're doing a version of that with Hughes between Hughes and Dish. But as I said, it's just a couple of small examples. We expect a lot more to happen this year.

Great. And last one for me is to touch on that satellite connectivity you led with. Obviously, the direct to device market's gotten a lot of excitement out there. How do you view that market, the uniqueness that you bring to the table with the spectrum? But also we get the question a lot,

a replacement for terrestrial? So maybe if you could just kind of expand a little bit on the direct to device opportunities, and it's a fairly crowded marketplace, at least with a lot of people talking about it.

Yes. We believe we are very uniquely positioned. I'll talk about that in a second. I think it really is not as crowded as it seems. It's crowded from announcement, but not crowded from the reality of what is possible.

I think there's only a couple of different ways, a couple of different companies that can possibly do this properly. First of all, we have been in service offering direct to device messaging in international markets and we could easily do that in The United States. There's nothing special the markets that we are offering to. We have been doing this for the past couple of years and commercial service. So people are just announcing that as a novelty.

We have been in a market. We are working on the next generation of connectivity, which is far beyond a messaging connectivity. We expect to have broadband connectivity, which provides natural use as you can have voice, video, just everything, the same as you would have on your standard mobile phone, your iPhone or your Android phone, you would have the same and you would have it everywhere in the world. We have the highest ITU rights coming back to what makes us special. First of all, we have the most important ITU rights to offer this and I think that's and a spectrum asset in The United States to offer that.

I think that's that in itself is probably the biggest endowment, but we also happen to be a company that is very capable, both in satellite and space as we use as a long heritage and global supplier to many, many satellite systems, including LEO systems such as OneWeb. So our experience, our institutional knowledge, our technical capability acumen in that space is unparalleled. Very few others have it. And then we also have a mobile system. I don't know anybody else that is both in a satellite and a terrestrial mobile company.

So you tie the two together. I mean, we think that equally important is not just about having expertise in one or the other. I think these are equally challenging and equally important skill sets in addition to the ITU rights and the spectrum ownership in The United States. We We just don't see anybody else on our radar that has all of that in one hand. So we are part of that work to make sure all of that becomes a reality.

Again, also to rely on experience, our experience that we have been providing messaging service to this satellite for the past couple of years. So it's not nothing new to us. I hope that answers your question. It was a long answer, but I think you had a few angles that you touched on.

Our next question is from the line of Michael Rollins with Citi. Please proceed with your question.

Thanks and good morning. You referenced earlier that wireless ARPU is growing. I'm curious if you could discuss some of the details on what you're seeing on intake ARPU versus what the average currently is to better appreciate where that may be going over time? And then second, just as you're looking at growth in the wireless business, can you expand the pace of quarterly customer growth, while also reducing the EBITDA burn at the same time? Or are you in a situation where you need to pay for these customers first, keep investing in the marketing engine and then work on that EBITDA burn in future years?

So in terms of ARPU, I'll take that one first and then OIBDA, I'll take my best shot at it because I'm not sure what I 100% understood the question, but let me start with the ARPU. I mean, like generally, we are lifting the quality of our customer base. And the reason the ARPU the primary reason the ARPU is rising is because we are people adopting higher price plans. And so we are moving up in terms of what price plans we sell, bundled offers. And so that and you're going to see that trend continue.

We are essentially positioning boost, the combined boost now, the two brands at a more premium placement in the market and evidenced by the fact that every metric is not just the ARPU, every metric has improved. We have improved churn, we have improved customer adds and you've seen that. We think that trend will continue. Now in terms of OIBDA, this is a good OIBDA obviously goes down when you get more customers. Basis of it, any customer acquisition has an upfront investment of OIBDA and often even CapEx for you to get the customer and you pay that back during the through the customer lifetime value.

And we do a better job today than we have ever done in terms of value steering, taking a look at which price plans, which devices, which geographies in terms of markets provide us, which actions, whether it be upgrades, whether it be device offerings. We look at every angle to see how how we can maximize our customer lifetime value relative to what we spent to acquire that customer. And lastly, we're putting more and more people on net, which I think will improve our owner economics. All of the metrics that I just talked about get even better when we bring the customer on net. So there's a lot at play, but a simple answer to your question is, OIBDA will go down usually when you have faster growth, but then you will get paid for that obviously over time and that's how the mobile business works.

If If I missed a part of your question or nuance in your question, I'm happy to answer it.

No, that's helpful. I mean, if you're going to ramp customer acquisition significantly to your point, you pay for that upfront as you're describing and then you get the benefits potentially over that customer lifetime. And was just kind of curious as you looked at 2025 in terms of the exit rate of EBITDA burning 2024, how you balance those factors of trying to increase the pace of acquisition and paying for that relative to scaling that business over time?

Look, we I think that at the moment, I won't be able to give you a exact number, but I just want to say that we will focus on acquisition, profitable acquisition, profitable acquisition. I would not walk away from a profitable acquisition. We don't have a shortage of cash right now. I don't have a limitation that prevents me from growing the business profitably and we certainly get paid for that investment. Now I hope I get more customers than is on my budget and I'm happy to have a decline in my EBITDA as a result of that.

That is a solid investment that I get paid for. I get a return on that. At the moment, I don't have a limitation on a spending or capital at hand. We are sitting on significant amount of capital at hand to put to use. So hopefully we'll get more customers than we have planned.

So long way of saying, our primary focus is growth, profitable growth. Again, I want to underline profitable growth, because in that case, spending EBITDA is actually a good thing.

Our next question is from the line of Walter Piecyk with Leitchell. Please proceed with your question.

Thanks. Just on the sub growth, I mean, I just I think what's noticeable to me at least that gross adds being up 13.5% seems like a pretty major inflection. Obviously, service revenue grew sequentially. Rick was implying that you were getting this from bundling. Did I miss something in the prepared comments?

And if not, why are customers all of a sudden kind of signing up to the network? I don't know if you're going to planning on breaking out the traditional prepaid versus I guess what we consider to be postpaid. Just if you could just get a little bit more color on what's happening in that business and how sustainable is that going to be going to 2025?

Yes. So our growth of subscriber is not from bundling. It is from the 1,000 actions we have taken last year to improve the customer experience, the network experience of Boost Mobile, and we think that's a sustainable improvement. I have been saying internally and obviously, generally generalizing saying that there's not a single process we had at the beginning of twenty twenty four that we had the same at the end of twenty twenty four. We brought the two brands together.

We redesigned practically every workflow that impacted the customers, whether it be from acquisition to activations, to billing, to customer care. I think if you our and we have seen the result of that. I don't want to repeat the fact that in every metric we have improved. And I think customers are recognizing that we have a fresh network. It's got incredibly good experience in terms of service experience.

I think we make it much easier to adopt. We have been much more focused on making sure that the experience is really polished. So I won't put it into bundling and I wouldn't say this was a one time effect that we worked on. We are now as it comes to prepaid, postpaid, I think the market has been too in our view and over time, we'll talk more about this. I think the market has been too focused on formal payment as being the differentiator.

We don't see it that way. We see no other industry in the world, whether it is auto industry or housing industry or any other industry that finances a customer, they're not talking about segregating the customers who pay cash versus non cash. You go buy a house, you first choice of payment or buy a car, no car dealer asks you to know if you just want to pay installments or cash go to another store. Whereas in The U. S.

And in mobile market that happens, we want to serve everything off of one hand. For us, we look at our profitability and our prepaid customers

are not in any way disappointed to be a lead postpaid customers that are very profitable, But I think we're not hung by a notion of only one set of customers is profitable. We look at every customer on a profitability basis. We're very happy with the progress we have made on the customers we have gotten this year. We continue to focus

The problem is you're not going to break that out and we're not going to get some sense of kind of what the inflection was on the growth more recently, which part of the business. Because I'm on the I guess I'm on the postpaid side, mine works pretty good. Like are there more me people coming on or is it the traditional prepaid guys that are driving this growth?

The answer is we're not going to break it out because we actually trying to merge the experience to be one. And I can tell you that if you look at many postpaid plans, if you don't have to finance a device, you end up with a much easier, shorter payback than a postpaid customer. There used to be a time that the difference between postpaid and prepaid was incredibly large in terms of monthly payments, service cost, service pricing. It used to be very different in terms of churn. And those metrics those assumptions are no longer real.

Those assumptions have changed over time, and I think the market is still hanging on. We look at every customer based on the customer lifetime value and profitability. So we're not going to break down postpaid versus prepaid because we think the industry ultimately merged the two.

Can you I'm on the network, but I'm not on the network because I got the alert, to change my SIM, I guess, to get on your network. I'm like a Boost one customer, I guess, you call me, I forget, or Boost Ultimate, I forget what your branding is. But nevertheless, can you give us some sense of like how many people, how many subs, amount of traffic, whatever it is that are on the network that you built versus your roaming partners? And then how is that how are those roaming partnering relationships kind of playing out? Like where are you sending more traffic?

How does that evolve over time? Because that's obviously a cost component that's impacting you on the cash side.

Hey, Walt, it's John. Glad you're enjoying the experience on the network. In my opening comments, I shared we're over $1,000,000 on net now. And that's so those are customers on our core, on our RAN, enjoying their use of the service. I also said, look, when we have a compatible device that's in one of our open markets, our goal is to put that customer onto our own five gs network.

Now when you think about how that interplays with our roaming and MVNO partners, obviously, we were able to use both of those relationships as we've discussed in past calls for in market and out of market roaming. They work a little differently. We have a little bit of focus on how do we make sure we own the customer. And then based upon where people work, live and play, we can make sure that they're connecting to the right RAM. But we've generally been very happy with how the technology is working and it's really a big advantage for us to really have access to more RAN sites than anybody.

So we think about that in terms of how we bring customers onto the network. I think one of the major differentiating factors continues to be whether or not the device itself can support five gs SA and Bonner. And we've talked about that in the past as well. And I remember talking to you on a call a couple of years ago where we had literally one certified device, right? And I think we've now completely flipped over where we have only one device that we're selling that isn't compatible with our network.

So the ecosystem supported us. We've got a little bit of head of the industry in terms of the type of device technology we needed to run the network, but that's now all come back into balance. And so and look, I'd also be remiss not to point out, we do have some commitments around loading on to our network between now and June. And we have every intention to hitting those and we're pleased with the performance we're seeing on that as a result of that.

The next question is from the line of Jonathan Chaplin with New Street Research. Please Please proceed with your questions.

can give us a sense of how the enterprise and wholesale revenue line is progressing. It's difficult to sort of see that within the way you've reconstituted results and how where you think that revenue line could be by the end of the year? And then a housekeeping question for Paul, Spectrum amortization, does it start when the spectrum goes into service or when you purchase the spectrum? And then going back to the direct device comments for you, Hamed, is do you need to launch do you need to use a LEO satellite to really do direct to device effectively or rather a LEO constellation? And if so, is that something you would do yourself or would you partner and who would be the ideal partners for that?

EchoStar (SATS) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

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