Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Conference Call to report the Fourth Quarter 2023 Financial Results for Telesat. Our speakers today will be Mr. Dan S. Goldberg, President and Chief Executive Officer of Telesat; and Andrew Browne, Chief Financial Officer of Telesat. I would now like to turn the meeting over to Mr. Michael Bolitho, Senior Director of Treasury and Risk Management. Please go ahead, Mr. Bolitho.

Thank you and good morning. This morning we filed our annual report for the year ending December 31, 2023, on Form-20F with the SEC and on SEDAR Plus. Our remarks today may contain forward-looking statements. There are risks that Telesat's actual results may differ materially from the results contemplated by the forward-looking statements as a result of known and unknown risks and uncertainties. For a discussion of known risks, please see Telesat's Annual Report filed with the SEC. Telesat assumes no responsibility to update or revise these forward-looking statements. I will now turn the call over to Dan Goldberg, Telesat's President and Chief Executive Officer.

Okay. Thanks, Michael. I'll say a few words this morning about our performance last year, share some thoughts about our expectations for this year, and then give an update as to progress to date on the Lightspeed program. I'll then hand over to Andrew to speak to the numbers in more detail, and then we'll open the call up to questions. I'm very pleased with our performance and the things we achieved in 2023. We did a really effective job in staying focused, in beating our adjusted EBITDA guidance, maintaining our operating discipline and industry-leading operating margins, securing the C-band clearing proceeds, and executing what I believe were some value-enhancing debt repurchases. But far away, the most important thing we did last year was find an innovative and highly accretive path forward for Telesat Lightspeed, including landmark agreements with MDA and SpaceX as well as important financing arrangements with our government partners in Canada. The satellite user community fully consistent with our long-standing expectations is transitioning to LEO network and this transition will accelerate over time. For that reason, moving forward with our transformational Telesat Lightspeed program is our highest priority. 2024 marks the first full year where Telesat starts to make that transition to LEO in earnest and to help all of you track what we're doing. Starting this year, we're breaking down our financials between GEO and LEO and showing consolidated numbers as well. As you can see in our top-line guidance that we released this morning, we're expecting some significant revenue declines around CAD150 million in GEO this year, split pretty evenly between our video and non-video businesses. We're not giving guidance beyond 2024 today, where I would note we're not expecting to see this magnitude of annual top-line decline in the coming years. On video, the…

Thank you, Dan. Good morning, everyone. I would now like to focus on highlights from this morning's press release and filings. Telesat ended the year 2023 with reported revenues of CAD704 million, adjusted EBITDA of CAD534 million, and generated cash from operations of CAD169 million with CAD1.7 billion of cash on the balance sheet at the year-end. As Dan has mentioned, we outperformed our 2023 adjusted EBITDA guidance. In the fourth quarter of 2023, Telesat reported revenues of CAD166 million, adjusted EBITDA of CAD123 million, and generated cash from operations of CAD13 million. For the fourth quarter of 2023 and compared to the same period of 2022, revenues decreased by CAD41 million to CAD166 million, operating expenses decreased by CAD30 million to CAD49.9 million and adjusted EBITDA decreased by CAD15.7 billion to CAD123.3 million. The adjusted EBITDA margin was 74.3% as compared to 67.2% in 2022. When adjusted for changes in foreign exchange rates, revenues decreased by CAD41.2 million, operating expenses decreased by CAD30.2 million and adjusted EBITDA decreased by CAD15.9 million. The revenue decrease for the quarter was primarily due to the completion of an equipment sale in 2022 to DARPA, which is not repeated in 2023, and a rate reduction on the renewal of a long-term agreement with a North American customer. The decrease in operating expenses is primarily due to lower non-cash share-based compensation and higher equipment sales in 2022 related to the DARPA program, as I just mentioned. Interest expense decreased by CAD2 million during the fourth quarter when compared to the same period in 2022. The decrease was due to the repurchase of notes from Term Loan B in 2023. This was partially offset by an increase in interest rates in the U.S. Term Loan B facility. In the fourth quarter, we recorded a gain…

[Operator Instructions] And the first question is from Chris Quilty from Quilty Space. Please go ahead.

Dan and crew, congratulations on getting that financing stub done. It's been a long trip over the years and somebody I can't decipher, I mean, can you remind us, what was the last publicly stated position you had in terms of debt rates? I think it was around $2 billion, correct?

Yes. Hi, Chris. Yep, that's about right. That'd be a U.S. number. I think what we've said is, well, Andrew, go ahead.

Yes, I'll go ahead. In fact, you know, on our website we have investor presentations. We did a kind of a small roadshow in November in Toronto, in New York, and - but reading out from page 19, just for anyone that [indiscernible]. Overall, in terms of our sources and uses, we had Telesat equity of $1.6 billion, Government funding $2.1 billion, which is your question, Chris, vendor financing of $300 million. And on, you know, just to round off in terms of our spending, overall we had $2.7 billion for our satellites, operational expenditures of about $800 million. And we also had contingency included of roughly 14% of $400 million, all contained within the overall program just to give you a quick refresher on that.

That's great. Thanks for the detail. So I kind of jumped over it. But, you know, congratulations on the, I think the vision you put forward here. You know with the focus on the enterprise market, and that brings up a question. You know, Starlink has obviously been hurting the maritime market and other adjacent markets, but haven't really - have you seen them at all target the traditional enterprise market? And can you help us understand the differentiation of what you're trying to do versus Starlink system?

Yes. Well, Chris, thanks. So let's see. Yes, they're definitely having an impact in maritime. They're working hard to make inroads in aero but it looks so far like they've had greater traction in Maritime than aero at this point. But in truth, we're kind of, you know, we're seeing them everywhere. We see them - when you say enterprise, maybe less kind of the corporate enterprise, but we are seeing them for backhaul requirements on certain networks. So that's where we're seeing them. And, you know, we said in our remarks, customers want affordable, high throughput, low latency, resilient connectivity. And, you know, SpaceX now has launched a lot of satellites. And it's a good product, but our product is differentiated for the verticals that we're focused on, which are those enterprise verticals. So, you know, we talked about telcos, mobile network operators, corporates, governments, aero, maritime. And I'd say, you know, it's a few things. You know, one of the key things that we do, unlike a service that's kind of principally a consumer-grade focused service, we've got the ability with our customers to do a bunch of things, give them SLAs, make commitments around CIR, give our customers the ability to have their own dedicated bandwidth pools, which then they can manage. They can oversubscribe it. They can offer different service tiers. They can move their bits around across their network, which for some of them could be the entire earth. So, it gives them massive flexibility, massive control over their bits, over their network. So, I'd say that's a big part of the differentiation from the customer standpoint, you know, I think from - I don't know, the investor standpoint. What we're doing, I think is also very capital efficient. We're able to cover the world with terabytes and terabytes of this very high performing capacity with hundreds of satellites, not thousands of satellites and satellites that last, you know, north of 10 years. So gives us a long opportunity to earn the kind of returns that we need to - on our invested capital. So in any event, and look again, I think, you know, SpaceX is moving fast and being disruptive. We don't get everything right around here, to say the least, but we definitely saw the transition from GEO to LEO coming and what a powerful value proposition that is for our enterprise customers. So we've been all over that. But I'd say as good as SpaceX is and as fast as they're moving like no one's going to own this entire market. The market's huge. It's growing fast. I'd say, particularly for enterprise customers, they never want to put all of their hedges in any one basket. And so, in any event, we're excited to get moving and get out there as fast as we can. As you probably picked up in my remarks this morning, we're just super focused on making big investments to get there as fast as we can.

Great. So NDA clearly has a pretty tall task ahead of them here over the next couple of years. But after listening to the Eutelsat OneWeb call, I find myself asking you the more important question, which is, where are you in terms of your gateway filing?

Ah, in terms of, so are you kind of U.S. focused?

Well, no, I mean for the global deployment. I mean, you know, OneWeb's had their constellation up and it's still not fully operational because they couldn't get their gateways installed due to regular.

Yes. Nope, I've tracked all that too. So here's what I'd say, a few things about gateways, one, for better or worse, we've been working on this for a long time. So we've identified. You know, we're starting off with at a minimum, 25 landing stations around the world. They'll all be, you know, connected up and the like. And then we'll scale our landing station infrastructure from there. And then for any given customer in any given country, we can kind of have sort of more bespoke landing stations as well with some of the flexibility that an advanced system like ours has. The other thing I'd note about Lightspeed, maybe unlike OneWeb, is we've got the Optical Inter-Satellite Links on our constellation. And so what that means is you probably need, never mind, probably - you need fewer gateways in order to still have full global coverage and connectivity and the opportunity to manage traffic around and to make sure that all of your satellites, 24/7 are kind of on the network and able to contribute. So, yes, we've identified the landing stations, where we need to go. I think we'll be in good shape there.

Would you be interested in buying a Starlink optical crosslink?

You know what - it's an interesting question, and I'll share with you that we haven't had any conversations with Starlink about that. You know, there are probably pros and cons of doing something like that. Pros being SpaceX is building lots of them. And it would allow us to theoretically interconnect with their constellation, although they're flying lower than we are. So, where we do interconnect with those guys, probably do that in RF rather than optical. I'm not sure that the Starlink optical link is SDA compliant. That would have to be something that we would take into consideration. There are a number of good OISL, Optical Inter-Satellite Link providers out there with heritage and the like. So anyway, stay tuned on that. We've. We've announced a good many of our suppliers, including MDA and SpaceX. We announced Aalyria working with us on some of the software that's going to orchestrate the constellation. And as we work with MDA and pick that kind of next-level supply chain, folks will learn more about the maybe different component parts of the network.

Great. Final question. Nimiq 5, was that a one-year or a multi-year contract?

Nimiq 5, well --

Is it coming up for renewal?

Yes, it's coming up for renewal. So, you know, so it hasn't been renewed yet. We've started having conversations with EchoStar about it. But it, you know, it was a 15-year agreement that comes up in October of this year, so stay tuned on that.

Got you.

Thanks, Chris.

Thank you.

Thank you. And the next question is from Mr. Arun Seshadri from BNP Paribas. Your line is now open.

Yes. Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. First from me, I noticed this word, like in your funding conditionality, that the program is fully funded to global service delivery subject to certain conditions. If you kind of outline what those conditions are, would be helpful. And then separately, on the funding plan itself, clearly strong support from the Government of Canada around the $750 million reduction and being cheaper today. Can you sort of tell us how you calculate that $750 million? So we just understand the puts and takes there?

Yes. We have, Andrew, do you want to start with that? And then I'll maybe talk about what, some of the conditionality?

Yes, absolutely. You know, as you know, that we were initially dealing with sort of palace and dealing with the export credit agencies. And I have to say the export credit agencies are not necessarily cheap, right? And they have a lot of fees, a lot of upfront fees and premiums. And so when you calculate, you know, the arrangements that we have come with the - with the Canadian government, and you do the math, basically that it just falls out of the equation. It's $750 million cheaper.

And over to me on conditionality, I mean, so I've got to be definitely careful here. My General Counsel is sitting across the table for me. So what would I say on the conditionality that doesn't make my GCI rate? I guess I'd say, you know, the conditionality, it's kind of typical stuff with any funding agreement, right? So we have to enter into definitive agreements. We've got multiple funding sources. Each funding source needs to make sure that the other one is there and it's got, you know, and that in the aggregate we have sufficient cash to "fully fund the program". So it's that kind of stuff. As you can see, I'm a big believer in action, speaking louder than words. We're confident we've got the financing in place that we need to move our project forward, which is why we're hiring all these people and spending all this money and entering into all these contracts. But that's when we referenced it. We're kept on a tight leash here by our legal department. And so it was mostly just to be just careful to say, yes, we still need to get those definitive agreements in place and the like.

And I would think, I would just add further that we've got contingency, you know, as we mentioned, a $400 million also within our program.

Got it. No, that's helpful. On that - on the original, the $750 million plan, the reduction. So obviously, understand, Andrew, that the export agencies are not necessarily that cheap, but just in terms of the assumptions in that $750 million, is that just, you know, kind of over the total, the debt costs over a certain period of time that are - that it's lower by. Like, can you just share those assumptions in advance of the disclosure that's going to come out tonight?

Yes, I'll take that. I mean, fundamentally, yes, like we've stared at what were our total cost of borrowings under the original plan with another vendor and what it is now. We took everything into account. We took into account what the total CapEx and other costs of the original program were versus the new one. We took into account what our expected cost of borrowings would be over the life of the funding commitments, right? So the interest rate, any other, and this is relevant for the export of credit agencies premium and stuff like that, that you have to pay. And then we compared that to what our expectations are will be our cost of borrowings for what I'll call the new and improved approach. And yes, that's the math we did the $750 million savings over the course of the program. And it's my expectation that in the near term, we'll provide some additional details around our funding terms and it'll allow folks to kind of, make their own calculations about what our cost of borrowings are.

A rigorous process that we've gone through.

Got it. Understood. Thank you. And then separately, can you talk about broadcast revenue? It seems like even adjusting for the run rate, Bell and maybe a little bit for the EchoStar, your broadcast revenue is still a little bit lower than we would have expected if you could give any additional color there. And then also how much in GEO OpEx reductions are embedded in your EBITDA guidance. Thank you.

I'll let Andrew take the second one. I'll start with the first one. So, yes, I mean, and I said in my opening remarks, the expected decline in video overwhelmingly driven by one thing that's already happened, which was the renewal that we secured with Bell for Nimiq 4. Yep. Sorry, just keeping my Nimiq straight with Nimiq 4 last October. So we had nearly three months of the impact of that lower rate last year, but we got the full run rate impact of it for this year. And we set at the time. I know, it was a significantly lower rate that we agreed with Bell to close that Nimiq 4 renewal. So that's the biggest contributor to the expected decline in broadcast this year. And then, you know, there's Echo. So we just started conversations with Echo. Our guidance accommodates, you know, a range of different outcomes with where we end up with them from, you know, they don't renew anything to - they renew just part of it or they renew all of it. But no matter what our expectation is, given what's going on in the market, given the other recent renewals we got. We are expecting under any scenario, it's going to be materially less revenue from DISH on Nimiq 5 than what we've been recognizing over the past 15 years. So anyway, and then, you know, there are other broadcast customers we have that we sort of take into account when we put our projections together. But fundamentally, it's the two that I've highlighted.

Got it helpful. Last thing for me is how much do you plan on spending, you know, I guess, on Lightspeed before getting definitive docs from, I guess, the Canadian government on the funding? And when do you - and when you think about the OpEx side, you kind of mentioned on EBITDA for 2025, the step down would be less than 2024. Any way you could quantify the OpEx, you know, within that - within '25 that you can expect, you know, today? Thanks. That's all from me.

I'll address some components of your questions indeed. I think your first question was relating to the step down in our GEO OpEx. And as you probably appreciate, our fixed costs are approximately, you know, 62%, 65%. And nonetheless, we've gone through in great detail looking at our plans or scale of plans and gone through the investment in Lightspeed there in the future. But then - so we've brought our GEO costs down now approximately, I'd say 4% or so, notwithstanding the fact that our costs are pretty well fixed. And then when you look at Lightspeed, that indeed about 65% to 70% of that increase is indeed fixed. And primarily it's coming from compensation as we scale up and we hire people coming in. And then, you know, just coming back to our sort of guidance and adjusted EBITDA $340 million to $360 million. But just to compare, if you take a look at what we said is $90 million - $80 million $90 million for Lightspeed. If you actually added that back to what adjusted EBITDA guidance is, we come to a margin of like 79% to 80%. So our costs are very, very focused. And after 2025, we probably maybe, you know, as Dan had said, I think our expectations in terms of, you know, top line will not see the reductions that we're seeing now. And in OpEx, we probably wouldn't give any guidance right now specifically for 2025. So I hope that's kind of addressed your - you know, the variation of your questions.

Yes. Thank you.

Thank you. And the next question is from Mr. Walter Piecyk from LightShed. Please go ahead.

Yes. Hi, everybody. This is Joe for Walt. You provided a CapEx range. I just want to kind of get a sense of what's the difference between hitting the high end versus coming in that $1 billion low end of the range. Is there something like, what's the limiting factor right now?

Well, I mean, our suppliers need to hit milestones in order to get money from us. So, you know, we've got a nominal schedule that they need to achieve, but if they don't hit their milestone, we aren't going to pay them. So, you know, we've built the range principally around that.

Okay. And then getting back to, I think it was Chris' question about enterprise, if you could - if you drill down a little further into that, just so I understand, were these customer contracts that were up for renewal, and they required having LEO as part of the solution going forward? So there's going to be a non-renewal. So how does that work with the kind of guide comes down that much?

Yes, that's exactly it, Joe. I mean, we had contracts coming up for renewal. I said in my opening remarks that a big chunk of it, the biggest contributor was around maritime. It was cruise. We've got customers that have been serving the cruise market, and they lost business to Starlink. And so they didn't renew their contracts with us. That's how it works. That's what it was. That's exactly what it was. And that accounts for, again, that was the biggest contributor.

Okay. And then are those - how long are those contracts generally? Like, is there a chance, or let's say the next renewal, whenever that is one in 2027 or 2026 or whatever, when you have something that's potentially on the horizon to be commercial with Lightspeed that you could win that business back?

Yes. Look, its pretty fluid. I mean, the big enterprise customers are sophisticated about, you know, what's happening out there in the market. They have quite a bit of flexibility to add networks, drop networks. They'll make some, I'd say maybe kind of medium-term commitments, maybe two or three years or something like that. And I don't have full visibility of exactly, you know, what they've committed to Starlink. I know that Starlink has had a practice of oftentimes not signing long-term agreements with customers. It's almost kind of month-to-month in some ways whether they did something differently with the cruise customers. I don't know. But suffice to say that the cruise lines and the service providers that serve them are well aware of what we're working on with Lightspeed. They are like what we can offer and the flexibility that we offer and our ability to concentrate capacity at ports and on key shipping lines. They like to have a diversity of suppliers, as I mentioned. So, yes, I mean, we're - I hate losing any renewal, but, yes, we're sure not kind of blocked out of the market on a go-forward basis.

And then my last question, on the funding, you mentioned the Canadian government, is the provincial government, the Quebec provincial government, still involved in the funding process?

Yes. Our expectation is that Quebec will be a meaningful funding participant in our program. Quebec gets great things from this Lightspeed initiative, I'd say now more than ever that we're working with MDA. When I think about the amount of investment that was going to be made in Quebec under the original plan, when Quebec had agreed to certain funding commitments, now that MDA is our prime contractor. Yes, the amount of investment in Quebec is gone up, I'd say dramatically. So, yes, our expectation is Quebec will be part - one of our funding sources.

Okay. Thanks.

Okay. Thanks, Joe.

Thank you. And the next question is from Mr. Mike Pace from JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning, guys, and thank you for the added color on the guidance between the two segments. I guess just to dig down a little bit, Dan, you said that you don't expect the same type of declines in 2025, and I guess I understand that on a total basis because the broadcast renewals. But from an enterprise, would you continue to expect enterprise to decline at that same kind of rate? And maybe another way to get at it is, and I think we've discussed this in the past, how much of your enterprise business do you think is at risk for real alternatives, including your own, eventually?

That's a great question. I'm smiling because we had anticipated this question, still not sure we have a great answer for it. So what would I - what would I say? Look, we've got a long-term plan. We gave our guidance, obviously, this morning for 2024, we have a decent amount of visibility. It's one of the nice things about our sector, a decent amount of visibility in terms of, you know, what our longer-term performance will probably be. You don't always get it exactly right, but we've got a decent track record, I think. So, we've done a pretty, I'd say for most companies, a super rigorous analysis. We've done a real kind of round-up analysis looking out beyond 2024. And having done that, it's why we were able to say this morning that it isn't our expectation, which is to say it is not our expectation that we're going to have the magnitude of top-line decline in future years that we've had this year. We need to do a little bit more work, I think, to give a, you know, I don't know, substantive lack of a better word, answer to your question about where, you know, are you more vulnerable to, for instance, Starlink or even cannibalizing our own revenue? We used to give some guidance about the percentage of our enterprise revenue, or maybe even our total revenue that we anticipated would migrate over to Lightspeed over time. And like many things, I've forgotten what we said. But, John, do you remember what we had said? I want to say we had estimated it was around 55% - I'm sorry, 50% of our enterprise revenues that we thought would be migratable to Lightspeed over time.

I think that's what we said, believe it was in that zone. There are some things that just aren't suitable for, that are better served.

So you know, that was kind of the estimate that we gave before. And so I would say now, again, we said that a little while ago, and already we've seen some move off, not for Lightspeed, but Starlink, but in many ways, it'd probably be a similar book of business that, you know, could move to Lightspeed that would be more vulnerable to, you know, LEO competition with large, I, again, think that Lightspeed is a better value prop for enterprise users than the other LEO constellations. But I don't know, it's a long-winded winded answer, Mike. And as I said, we need to do a little bit more work on it, but kind of order magnitude that's probably the, you know, book a business that's at risk. And I'm sure looking at my colleagues who do the work of updating the long-term plan, I'm sure that's kind of how we thought about it. And to be clear, we assume in our forward projections that there is that there are additional requirements that move to LEO, including - before Lightspeed's available, which is to say we lose it. So, yes, I think we've captured that.

Okay. A few more and they can be quicker on my end. I just want to make sure I understand. So if I take your consolidated EBITDA guidance for '24, and I add back the Lightspeed OpEx, is that basically the GL business or the restricted group in terms of EBITDA?

Yes, it is correct. Absolutely. Yes, Mike.

Okay. And then can you share what the Lightspeed OpEx was in 2023, please?

In 2023, it was approximately just under CAD50 million CAD48 million to be precise.

Canadian.

Yes, Canadian.

Yep. Thank you. And then I think I got the math here. You did not repurchase any debt in the fourth quarter. Can you confirm that and anything subsequent to the end of the quarter?

That's correct, yes.

Okay. And then I believe you still have a $150 million basket. I don't recall if it's RP or committed investments that you can move from GEO or a restricted group - to the unrestricted group that happened. If not, when should we expect that to happen if we should?

It has not happened. We would expect to do that very soon.

Okay. Great. Thanks, guys.

Thanks, Mike.

Thank you. The next question is from Marcello Chermisqui from Ares. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys. Thanks so much for taking the question. I wanted to ask a couple of questions on the guidance. My understanding is maritime and aerospace represent about 20% of enterprise sales. So about CAD70 million of the 2023 enterprise sales. So it seems like between, like, the cruise business and the aerospace customer, it could be down 50% in 2024, so in line with what you were saying, the Starlink competition was. Is that the right way to think about that?

Hold on. John's just going to confirm. So let's see. So the sheet that I'm looking at has aero and maritime, a little bit less than 20% of our total revenue. I forget what you would kind of characterize as a percentage of our enterprise revenue. So I haven't done the backward math on that, but roughly half of that. So, yes, there you go. So, I'm sorry. So the question again.

Yes, so it seems like aerospace, maritime is down 50% in your guidance. Is that the right way to think about it?

We're staring at something. Hold on. It will be roughly. Yes, you've done good math there. It sounds like.

Appreciate it. So it seems like, given your earlier comment about 50%, like the potential loss of Starlink, do you think that there's not much more risk there, or do you think that that segment might have incrementally more than the 50%?

That segment would probably have incrementally more, maybe less aero and more Maritime is how we would think about it. I think Starlink's having, yes, of all the verticals right now, probably having the biggest impact in maritime for what we felt so far.

Okay. No, that's helpful. And then on the broadcast revenue side, it seems like you're guiding to 50% of the total revenue decline. So about $75 million. If I look at the decline from the fourth quarter versus the third quarter of 2023, it seems like a $10 million decline, likely mostly due to Nimiq 4 with the Bell contract renewal. So that would imply about $30 million of decline baked into 2024 numbers. So the remaining, say $45 million of broadcast revenue decline outside of Nimiq 4, is that all Nimiq 5, because I think that one is only two months remaining. Even if you assume zero, it seems like there might be other stuff that's going on.

So I think your map around the impact of Nimiq 4 is kind of directionally right. There might have been some other stuff in there as well. Then, as I mentioned, the other big, I would say, the anticipated contributor would be DISH, and by DISH and EchoStar. And there, yes, I mean that it comes up in early October, and we just it's just too early to say, you know, whether that gets renewed at all or, you know, it's just some partial renewal. So it's that. And then beyond that, yes, just kind of making provision for any other erosion that we could potentially have and also those are the component parts of that.

Okay. No, that's helpful. And then I noticed in the disclosures, you mentioned something about Nimiq 4 that happened earlier this year. So what are your contingency plans with Bell in case something more permanent happens to Nimiq 4? And is it correct that the insurance only lasts until November 2024?

So we'll take the insurance first.

Nimiq 4, is at the end of its life or near end of its orbital maneuver life. So it has very little book value, so it has very little insurance. What insurance is there expires in November of 2024?

And then, as far as, you know, kind of contingency for Bell so right now they use Nimiq 4 and they use Nimiq 5. I think the first thing I'd say is, and try Nimiq 6. Thank you, Dave. You know, we highlighted the issue that we had with Nimiq 4. You know, it's the right thing to do, to highlight it for everyone. My own expectation is that Nimiq 4 makes it to its anticipated end of life. You know, you never know. If it didn't, Bell's got Nimiq 6 and they're using that. And beyond that, we'll see where we land with EchoStar on the Nimiq 5 renewal. Maybe there's some ability to use Nimiq 5 to look after Bell, if they needed it. So certainly, I'd say those are kind of the things that we think about. And Bell's a sophisticated customer, I mean, they understand, you know, how the networks work.

Really appreciate it. And sorry, just on Nimiq 5 like are you on the scale of assumptions, are you assuming no revenue for that in the 2024 guide?

I just say we, like, you know, we gave a range of guidance. It can accommodate a range of different outcomes if you know, so, yes, it accommodates all kinds of different outcomes with EchoStar, my own guess is we get a partial renewal with them, but it's just too early to say. They've got work to do on their side in terms of, you know, how they go about distributing all the channels that they need to distribute. And so they've got work to do with them. We've known those guys for a long, long time. We have a good relationship with them. But it's still some months away, and we developed a guidance range that accommodates just a whole range of different outcomes for them.

And that satellite, does that represent a significant, much more revenue versus other Nimiq satellites or other satellites you have? Or is it pretty consistent with, in terms of size, scale of other ones?

I'd say of the Nimiqs kind of same order of magnitude with, you know, Nimiq 4, Nimiq 5, Nimiq 6, recognizing, I should say, if you go back to the original rates on because Nimiq 4 and Nimiq 5 have been renewed at lower rates - much lower rates than their first 15 years of life. But if you went back and looked at the rates on the original rates on Nimiq 4, Nimiq 5, and Nimiq 6, yes, they're kind of all in the same ballpark.

Very helpful. Thanks so much for answering the questions.

You're welcome.

Okay, we have one more - we have time for one more brief question.

Thank you. And the last question is from Mr. Joe Ghergurovich from Sixth Street. Please go ahead.

Hi, thanks for squeezing me in here. Most of my questions have been answered. I guess just one on the fourth quarter performance EBITDA coming in better than expected. Was there - were there any one-time items in there or what was driving that?

And overall, I think it's just sort of timing, the timing of other expenditures, particularly as we invest in sort of Lightspeed going forward. As you can probably tell, we control the OpEx pretty, pretty tightly. And so, you know, with the program as soon as we get going in 2024, that's why we accept overall guidance. So I'd say that's kind of one of the main contributing elements in addition to the frugality of how we manage the business.

Got it. And then just one more on - so, just to be clear, the $700 million of government funding that you were in advanced discussions or as of last quarter, are you saying now that the whole $2.1 billion government funding is now secured and you expect to release details after the close.

I don't know what the $700 million reference is to. We had noted in the earnings release, and I reiterated it in my remarks that that we expect to have about $750 million of savings relative to what our original funding plan was. And by savings, I mean savings in terms of our cost of borrowings in addition to the $2 billion CapEx savings. And then as far as that, $2.1 billion, so there, I'd say stay tuned. The government of Canada, we would expect, would be a meaningful amount of our government partner funding sources. We expect that Quebec, as I mentioned earlier, will also be part of that. And so I would just say stay tuned. We expect to make some information available in the near term around the Government of Canada financing. And then - it's not going to be too long until we do our Q1 call. So we'll probably be able to provide a bit of an update there as well.

Got it. Thank you very much for your time.

Thank you, Joe. Alright. Well, listen, everyone, thank you very much for joining us this morning. As I mentioned, our Q1 call is kind of around the corner. So we look forward to speaking with everyone again then. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

Thank you. The conference has now ended. Please disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.