Despite the historic swings in the markets this year, largely brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, one industry seems untouched for now: satellites.
"It's still too early to tell," said Matt Desch, Iridium Communications' CEO.
Desch spoke to Cheddar exclusively Tuesday at the Satellite 2020 conference in DC, a day before the event was cut short when the city declared a state of emergency.
"We have a little bit of exposure in China," he said, referring to the company's business and supply chain. "It doesn't really look like it's going to be much of an impact given the amount of [our] inventory."
Iridium, with 66 low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellites, provides communication and data services to the U.S. government and transportation industries.
The company ended 2019 with revenues of $560 million, up 7 percent from $523 million in 2018. Iridium completed its satellite replacement program, Iridium NEXT, in 2019 so it says it has no more satellites on the assembly line and no additional launches are currently planned.
Growth, Iridium says, is attributed to the double digit revenue growth in the Internet of Things category among others.
The company, for example, connects and tracks sensors on everything from pipelines and trains, to buoys in the ocean and Caterpillar equipment.
"We're [even] tracking animals," said Desch. "We're on systems cleaning up plastics in oceans — hundreds and hundreds of things outside cell phone networks, which, amazingly after 30 years now, only cover about 10 to 15 percent of the Earth's surface."
Given how much impact the novel coronavirus has had on just about every industry — forcing companies like Google to cancel their biggest conferences, the global airlines industry expecting as much as $113 billion in losses, and even the New York Times guiding for potentially lower ad revenue as firms decide to pull back from extra spending — it's notable that aerospace currently appears to be the exception.
Eric Berger, senior space editor at Ars Technica, says the epidemic has seemed to have a "relatively modest impact on China's aerospace industry."
"In particular most of its launch program has proceeded normally or is likely to soon resume normal operations. So my sense is this may only modestly affect Iridium's operations, but a lot depends on how the Western world manages this overall situation," Berger told Cheddar in an email.
Iridium has walked a long road to where it is today. The first iteration of the company famously failed in 1999 with bankruptcy.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk brought up this history during his keynote on Monday, when he was asked whether SpaceX was spinning Starlink into its own public company.
"We're thinking about that zero," said Musk, putting his fingers in the air to emphasize. "We need to make the thing work."
Desch said he "was thrilled" when Musk brought this up in front of thousands of people.
"It shows Elon knows how challenging it is to create a global telecom company in space," said Desch. "His point was there's been no company that's launched that many satellites and made it through their first generation."
Iridium has been closely partnered with SpaceX. The satellite company replaced its aging constellation with Iridium NEXT satellites using SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets.
Starlink is SpaceX's broadband satellite business, which Desch says doesn't compete with Iridium's business.
While Starlink may ultimately compete with the Verizons and Vodafones of the world, says Desch, Iridium will stick with supply services to industrial, aviation, and military customers.
"I think he's going slowly and carefully, and with our experience I would encourage him to do that," said Desch with advice for Musk.
SpaceX is said to be raising more money at a $36 billion valuation. Iridium's market cap currently sits at around $3 billion. Shares of $IRDM are up over 120 percent since the end of January 2017, when the first Iridium NEXT launch took place.
