Operator
Operator
Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to ViaSat's FY 2013 Fourth Quarter Earnings Conference Call. Your host for today's call is Mark Dankberg, Chairman and CEO. You may proceed, Mr. Dankberg.
Viasat, Inc. (VSAT)
Q4 2013 Earnings Call· Thu, May 16, 2013
$58.07
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+19.34%
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1 Month
+22.62%
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+22.38%
Operator
Operator
Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to ViaSat's FY 2013 Fourth Quarter Earnings Conference Call. Your host for today's call is Mark Dankberg, Chairman and CEO. You may proceed, Mr. Dankberg.
Mark D. Dankberg
Management
Okay. Thanks. Good afternoon, and welcome, everybody, to our earnings conference call for our fourth quarter of our fiscal year 2013. I'm Mark Dankberg. I'm Chairman and CEO. And I've got with me here today, Rick Baldridge, who's our President and Chief Operating Officer; Shawn Duffy, who's our Chief Accounting Officer; and Keven Lippert, our General Counsel. And we're also happy to welcome, Bruce Dirks, our new CFO. Before we start, Keven will provide our Safe Harbor disclosure.
Keven K. Lippert
Management
Thanks, Mark. As you know, this discussion will contain forward-looking statements. This is simply a reminder that factors could cause actual results to differ materially. Additional information concerning these factors is contained in our SEC filings, including our most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. Copies are available from the SEC or from our website. So that's it. Back to you, Mark.
Mark D. Dankberg
Management
Okay. Thanks, Keven. So we'll be referring to slides that are available over the web. And I'll start with some highlights and a top-level business overview. After that, Shawn Duffy will discuss our financial results, and then I'll give a little more depth on each of the businesses segments. We've got a lot of really interesting stuff to cover, including information on our contract with Boeing for our ViaSat-2 satellite. And finally, I'll summarize our outlook, and then we'll take questions. So our fourth quarter was very good across all our business segments, and we're really happy with the fundamentals of each of them. Overall, we achieved record orders for the year of $1.4 billion, a 36% increase over fiscal year '12 and 61% higher than fiscal 2011. We achieved almost 100,000 consumer installations in the fourth quarter, with over 90% of that being new Exede subscribers. This resulted in net adds of 46,000, and that's a 21% sequential increase from our third fiscal quarter. We ended the fiscal year with 512,000 subscribers, and that's up 33% from the same time last year. We achieved record revenues of over $1.1 billion for the year, a 30% increase from fiscal year '12. Q4 of our fiscal '13 was also our fifth consecutive quarter of record revenues. Adjusted EBITDA company-wide was up 10% year-over-year for both the quarter and the entire year, even though earnings were somewhat attenuated due to sales and marketing expenses associated with our strong subscriber growth. Overall, it was a strong quarter and a good year in our progress on a number of fronts, as well as our financial results continue to build confidence in our view of the long-term market opportunity to compete in a broad range of broadband market segments where we can lead in delivering value driven by our space systems technology. We feel we're seeing market validation of this strategy in principle as demonstrated by ViaSat-1, and that it's worth investing in our winners. So now Shawn will give an overview on the financials, and then I'll come back with some highlights in each business segment and more on ViaSat-2 and our plans going forward.
Shawn Lynn Duffy
Management
Thanks, Mark. Well, as Mark mentioned, our fiscal 2013 has been a very strong year for us. And the charts on this page speak for themselves. Our Q4 revenues further demonstrate our progress, coming in at $309 million, which was an increase of $68 million year-over-year. As we will discuss more later, our service offerings have been the largest driving factor to our growth. We are closing out the year with revenue surpassing the $1 billion-mark, coming in at $1.1 billion for fiscal 2013, which reflects a $256 million increase over the prior year. Q4 adjusted EBITDA has also grown by 10% from Q4 FY '12 to $41 million, despite the current period impact of even higher subscriber acquisition costs than last quarter as our gross adds approached 90,000. So we are closing fiscal '13 with $163 million in adjusted EBITDA, 512,000 consumer subscribers on our satellite network and good growth momentum. So let's turn to the P&L as a whole, and look at the results a bit deeper. Starting with our fourth quarter, our mix of revenues reflected $125 million directly derived from our service offerings, which is now over 40% of the total revenue base. We also grew our product revenues by 22% to $184 million, fueled by growth in both our government and commercial segments. Our fourth quarter operational performance in the core business was very good. However, investments in Q4 subscriber acquisition costs, reflected in the growth in SG&A, resulted in a quarterly loss of $7 million. Conversely, the reenactment of the federal R&D credit legislation we discussed last quarter provided an additional $8 million benefit in Q4. So on a whole, non-GAAP net income rose $9.3 million to $8.8 million or $0.19 per share. For fiscal 2013, product revenues grew to $664 million from $542…
Mark D. Dankberg
Management
Okay. Thanks, Shawn. And this is also my chance to say how much we've really appreciated Shawn's work over the last 3 quarters, in both filling the Chief Accounting Officer and Chief Financial Officer role, and in helping transitioning our new CFO, Bruce Dirks. So Shawn's done a great job, and she's going to continue to participate in our conference calls and investor communications going forward. So now, I'll talk about each of our segments starting with Government Systems. And as Shawn just described, we finished a really strong year with another really strong quarter. Annual revenues grew 30% year-over-year, and annual EBITDA grew 48% year-over-year, and backlog also grew 25% year-over-year, all that in a very tough budget environment. We wouldn't have predicted that kind of growth at the beginning of the year even though we've been working hard to achieve the market positions that made it possible. We believe it's good evidence that we really have positioned ourselves as being able to help our customers do more for less money compared to alternative technology solutions. While mobile broadband services led the way, we also achieved growth in orders and/or revenues in all of our major government business areas including our MIDS Joint Tactical Radio System, information security and satellite products. Also, a pretty extraordinary accomplishment in this macro environment. The government mobile satellite broadband area has sustained exceptional growth in market share. We continue to add more user organizations, platform types, geographic coverage areas and bandwidth usage every quarter. We're also gradually introducing the benefits of Ka-band to our existing customer base, which we anticipate will -- so that they'll really appreciate the benefits of our ViaSat-2 compared to other mobility systems, and we just talked about that. But we don't have a short-term crystal ball that can…
Operator
Operator
[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Mike Crawford with B. Riley.
Michael Crawford - B. Riley Caris, Research Division
Analyst
Given the expected doubling of bandwidth economics with ViaSat-2, does that imply that this is going to be somewhere around a 300 gigabit per second capacity? And what is the total cost that you expect to incur to build, launch and and insure the satellite?
Mark D. Dankberg
Management
Okay. So describing the capacity is a little bit complicated because the way this satellite works is not the same way that ViaSat-1 works. When we gave the capacity numbers, they were -- those were -- think of them as benchmarks. They're like gas mileage numbers, and they're only meaningful in a specific context. So the trick that ViaSat-2 can do sort of makes those comparisons a little bit different in just giving a number like that. But I'll give you another way to look at it. When we did ViaSat-1, one of the things that we said was we thought we can get about 1 million subscribers with a given level of service, and that level of service is our Exede 12. So that means, in order to get doubling of the bandwidth benefits, we ought to be -- if the satellite costs were the same, we ought to be available to do 2 million at exactly that same level of service. And if the satellite cost or the system cost is higher, we need to do even more than 2 million for that to be true. And that right now, that's a good way to look at it.
Michael Crawford - B. Riley Caris, Research Division
Analyst
And so you don't want to say what the system cost is?
Mark D. Dankberg
Management
System cost, okay. On the system cost side, we'll do a disclosure subsequent to the call that will give the number on the satellite. But think of it, the satellite itself is probably about 40-ish plus percent higher than the ViaSat-1 satellite. The total system cost doesn't grow nearly as fast when you consider ground system launch and insurance. So when we started the ViaSat-1 project, our budget for all those things together was about $500 million. The budget for this is about 25% higher. So when you think about that, in order for us to get double the bandwidth productivity, that means that we need about 2.5x the equivalent subscribers. And so it definitely does that.
Michael Crawford - B. Riley Caris, Research Division
Analyst
Okay. Are there satellites in operation today that Ka-band -- that provide Ka-band connectivity without spot beams or steerable spot beams or was this going to be a completely new way to provide Ka-band service?
Mark D. Dankberg
Management
It's new. It is -- it's a new architecture.
Michael Crawford - B. Riley Caris, Research Division
Analyst
Okay. And then one last question for me. Regarding the litigation with Space Systems/Loral, which I believe is headed for a jury trial next February, where you're seeking, among other things, an injunction. What would happen if there is another satellite scheduled to be launched that might have some of that technology, appropriated technology on it? How would you address a situation like that?
Keven K. Lippert
Management
Mike, this is Keven. I think at this point, litigation is complex. We've obviously sought different types of damages, and an injunction is clearly one of those, but we'll just have to see how that plays out.
Operator
Operator
Our next question comes from Tim Quillin with Stephens.
Timothy J. Quillin - Stephens Inc., Research Division
Analyst · Stephens.
Mark, when you talked about 2.5 million subscribers, is that assuming that they're at fiber-to-the-node speeds?
Mark D. Dankberg
Management
No. To do an apples-to-apples comparison, one way to do it would be to say, how many subscribers could we do at the same service level? I think it's more likely that what we're going to do is improve the service level and have the number of subscribers be more of like what it was on ViaSat-1. So think about that as sort of the same number of subscribers at 2.5x the bandwidth. That would be the flip side of that. That 2.5x of bandwidth though can, if we do it that way can be manifested in multiple ways. It could be higher speed. It could be more usage, with a lot of ways we could implement that. And that we will decide based on what the market is closer to the time that we're go into service with it.
Timothy J. Quillin - Stephens Inc., Research Division
Analyst · Stephens.
Great. And so 98,000, first of all, in terms of installations, is that a sustainable number? And what are you seeing from DISH in terms of wholesale contribution and how sustainable is that?
Mark D. Dankberg
Management
Okay. So one is -- boy, I wish I could predict the future. What I can tell you is, we did in -- the March quarter is typically a seasonably -- seasonally more difficult quarter. So that gives us some upside going forward. But like I said, I think when you think about improvements that we're going to make, I wouldn't think of us just doing the same thing over and over but better. We have things that we intend to do, which includes adding different product variants and introducing new channels. There's some headwinds that we have as well, which is, DIRECTV has said that they intend to add Hughes to their services as well. So far, what we've seen has been pretty consistent and pretty much what we said at the beginning, which is, the demand seems to exceed the supply and DISH continues to work with us and DIRECTV will probably work with Hughes because both of them would like to get as many of the limited number of subscribers as they each can, and that makes complete sense. I think I can't tell you what's going to happen exactly, but I don't think that we've reached a ceiling of what's possible. It will just depend on how those different trends play out.
Timothy J. Quillin - Stephens Inc., Research Division
Analyst · Stephens.
And then...
Richard A. Baldridge
Analyst · Stephens.
Just to remind you, Mark did say earlier -- this is Rick. Mark did say earlier that the June quarter tends to be the more seasonally depressed quarter. I don't think we should look any different than somebody else.
Timothy J. Quillin - Stephens Inc., Research Division
Analyst · Stephens.
Right, right. And then what are you seeing from DISH right now?
Mark D. Dankberg
Management
We said that our wholesale adds for the fourth quarter were pretty much steady with our third quarter.
Timothy J. Quillin - Stephens Inc., Research Division
Analyst · Stephens.
Okay. And then lastly, just what percent of subscribers are on Exede?
Mark D. Dankberg
Management
Oh, we're over 50% Exede now on a total basis, pretty well over that, in the mid-to-high 50s, I think, ballpark?
Richard A. Baldridge
Analyst · Stephens.
Yes.
Shawn Lynn Duffy
Management
Yes, 58%, 58%.
Mark D. Dankberg
Management
58%.
Timothy J. Quillin - Stephens Inc., Research Division
Analyst · Stephens.
58%
Operator
Operator
Our next question comes from Rich Valera with Needham & Company. Richard Valera - Needham & Company, LLC, Research Division: First, just a question on the ViaSat-2 architecture, which certainly sounds pretty intriguing. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like the bandwidth on the satellite is actually dynamically configurable across geographies and spot beams, is that correct?
Richard A. Baldridge
Analyst
Yes, dynamically configurable across geographies. Richard Valera - Needham & Company, LLC, Research Division: I'm just curious, is a satellite like this, essentially a spot beam satellite with dynamically configurable capacity been built before or is this kind of the first of its kind?
Richard A. Baldridge
Analyst
As I said, it's the first of its kind anywhere near this combination of geographic coverage and total capacity. It's just never been done before. Richard Valera - Needham & Company, LLC, Research Division: Right, right. Very interesting. Look forward to seeing that in action. And then on the -- with the success I guess of the consumer program recently, you haven't talked too much about the in-flight, which we think should have imminent launch here coming up with JetBlue. Can you, one, talk about what your best guess as to the timing of the JetBlue launch? And then, can you give us any color on how your business model works for the in-flight broadband market? Are you kind of getting paid per megabyte basis per subscriber? Any sense of what your business model you expect to look like in that in-flight category would be helpful.
Mark D. Dankberg
Management
Okay. In-flight, we expect should be operational this summer. That's kind of -- I think we talked a little bit last time about LiveTV, which is doing the installs for JetBlue, had kind of radome issue to deal with the FAA. I think they have a resolution for that, and so things are proceeding from there for the summer. The business model, like we said before, we're trying -- we think we can change the business model in the in-flight space. Right now, the business model is high prices, low penetration, laptop-centric because of the high prices. JetBlue and us are looking to create an environment where basically penetration could be very high. Think of kind of everybody with a mobile device would use it and that we can take advantage of our bandwidth effectiveness to drive the cost down to the point where it can be free to the subscribers. And so JetBlue has said that, that's what they want to try. I mean, that's a different model. I think it could be -- we think it's exciting and could be extraordinarily successful. And so that's what we'll be trying, and that -- our -- we would essentially be paid on some form of bandwidth consumption basis by the airline, by JetBlue, who would give it away free. And the idea is, if the cost is low enough -- their description, the catchphrase they always used was, Coke and a bag of peanuts. If it costs the same to give people in-flight connectivity as it costs to give them a Coke and a bag of peanuts, that's a great way to drive customer satisfaction. And we think that if you get high penetration, that's a really good model for us. So that's what we'll be trying with them. Richard Valera - Needham & Company, LLC, Research Division: Okay, that's very helpful. And then just on the service -- the Satellite Service revenue line, it's a little higher than I would have modeled. Was there any kind of nonrecurring lump in that service number or is that kind of the baseline number we should use going forward as you add subs?
Shawn Lynn Duffy
Management
Yes. I wouldn't say that there's anything unusual in there that needed to be considered. I think it just reflects kind of our continuing growing ARPU. Richard Valera - Needham & Company, LLC, Research Division: Great, that's very helpful. And then just one more if I could on the SAC. Obviously, SAC was higher because you had a lot more subs than you expected, but was your per subscriber SAC sort of in line with your expectations?
Mark D. Dankberg
Management
Yes. I think we have different channels that have different costs, and when you blend them all together, it's pretty much right where we need it to be.
Operator
Operator
Our next question comes from Yair Reiner with Oppenheimer. William Lee - Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., Research Division: This is William Lee for Yair. Can you maybe give us a sense of how the data caps are working out for your subs. Are you seeing a lot of them hitting the caps? And if so, are they trading up or changing their behavior?
Mark D. Dankberg
Management
The data caps are -- the fact is, one of the reasons we'd like to be able to apply more bandwidth at the same price. We have a number ways to work on it. Well, I would say, our objective is not to try to extract money from our subscribers. We set that the data caps because we thought that there were a lot of subscribers who would not hit their caps. That's what we're seeing. What we're also seeing though is that subscribers will modify their behavior in an effort to fit within the caps. And actually, believe it or not, that's sort of what -- what we'd like to do is make it so that they don't have to modify their behavior and still fit within the caps. And those are the kinds of things that we intend to do going forward as we improve our service. But the short answer is, we're not modeling trying to drive more revenue out of subscribers, and we're trying to help them be even happier within whatever the caps are that we offer. William Lee - Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., Research Division: Right, right. And then I guess in terms of the ViaSat-2 that you just announced, how do you expect the capacity to be used, say, among the home broadband, Wi-Fi, defense, in-flight Wi-Fi, and any other commercial applications, how you segment the different buckets?
Mark D. Dankberg
Management
Okay, that's a little hard to predict at this point. One of the things that we've said, and I think it'll help you get some insight into that is, what we said is, by around the time that we launch ViaSat-2, we'd be pretty happy if we were generating in the range of 10% of our Satellite Services revenue from all of these adjacent businesses, and that includes the news gathering, live events, government and satellite, Wi-Fi connectivity. So that would, let's say, if we're at that point at around 2016 when we launch, I think that the capabilities of ViaSat-2, especially the transatlantic, maritime, Caribbean coverage will put us in a position to grow that percentage from there, at a faster rate than what it grew before. But right now, that's probably all we'd say. William Lee - Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., Research Division: Great, great. And one more if I may. In terms of depreciation, it looked like it was roughly -- it was somewhat flattish quarter-to-quarter. Any reason for that as opposed to maybe ramping up quarter-to-quarter?
Shawn Lynn Duffy
Management
Depreciation has a lot of different dynamics to it. We had some of our original legacy network that was coming off from a depreciation perspective, towards the end of its life. But there's kind of some different elements with various assets coming off and on, but nothing that was dynamically unusual.
Richard A. Baldridge
Analyst
In other words, a normal course, we'd expect it to grow as we add more subscribers for a while, but...
Shawn Lynn Duffy
Management
Overall. William Lee - Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., Research Division: And I guess, how should we think about depreciation into next year? Should it be, as you say, grow or should it be roughly running at fourth quarter's run rate?
Shawn Lynn Duffy
Management
No, definitely it's going to grow. I mean, we're going to see effects of both the CPE subscriber asset base growth, as well as just general growth as we grow up in mobility and other support metrics. So you definitely should see it growing quarter-over-quarter.
Operator
Operator
Our next question comes from Amy Yong with Macquarie Capital.
Andrew DeGasperi - Macquarie Research
Analyst · Macquarie Capital.
This is Andrew for Amy. I just had a -- first a question on the LonoCloud acquisition. What was the rationale behind that?
Mark D. Dankberg
Management
Okay. So the LonoCloud, what that -- what they have, think of it as a cloud operating system where most cloud services are sort of service provider-specific. So when you think of buying a certain cloud thing, you probably have to tailor your cloud integration or cloud usage, say, to Amazon or to somebody else, okay? What LonoCloud does is, think of it as a layer of abstraction or an operating system. That let's you say, hey, I want to buy transcoding services in the cloud or I want to buy video streaming support in the cloud. And then, just like you would talk to the printer or a disk drive. In the same way, you'd say, hey, get me these services and get them for me with this -- with these sorts of policy statements like, hey, here's my security approach, here's my pricing approach. And then LonoCloud lets you manage that dynamically. Helps you deal with the load balancing, failures, better pricing, all those things. We -- when we add all these services, we have a lot of cloud activities going on, and we basically acquired it because we wanted to use the software. We were already using the software, and we he had the opportunity to acquire it.
Andrew DeGasperi - Macquarie Research
Analyst · Macquarie Capital.
Great. And also on the -- I just want to -- sort of a clarification, I think -- did you say that pretty much -- you were hoping for a 10% of revenue on the satellites should be outside of the Satellite Services? In other words, about 90% of capacity should be the consumer business? And then secondly, what are your funding plans ahead of the launch of ViaSat-2?
Mark D. Dankberg
Management
Okay. So to answer the first question, if you look at the revenue that we would report in our Satellite Services business segment, let's say in 2016, that what we're sort of aiming for is about 90% of that being consumer and 10% being other. And other includes in-flight Wi-Fi, LAN mobile, government, things like that, okay? That answer that question?
Andrew DeGasperi - Macquarie Research
Analyst · Macquarie Capital.
Yes.
Mark D. Dankberg
Management
Okay. Then on the funding, basically the funding for ViaSat-2 comes out of cash flow from operations and basically, the usage of our existing credit lines.
Operator
Operator
Our next question comes from Ron Epstein with Bank of America.
Elizabeth Grenfell - BofA Merrill Lynch, Research Division
Analyst · Bank of America.
This is Elizabeth in for Ron today. I just had 2 questions. One, the 88,000 monthly add you had, where does that lie versus where you expected the adds to be at this point when you launched the satellite? I think you had talked about getting to 100,000 and presumably that would have happened before now, I think, given how you talked about it before, just how are you expecting that to continue to grow?
Mark D. Dankberg
Management
Okay. So what we talked about, the 88,000 was for the quarter, not monthly.
Elizabeth Grenfell - BofA Merrill Lynch, Research Division
Analyst · Bank of America.
I'm sorry. That's right.
Mark D. Dankberg
Management
And we had this discussion a few quarters ago, where we said, we thought 90,000 to 100,000 installs a quarter would be a good target. And in this quarter, we did 98,000. We don't think we've necessarily hit the ceiling, taking into account all the puts and takes, I've already said before, which is headwinds, due to, let's say, DIRECTV dividing up its distribution, seasonal adjustments, good growth due to other factors. We don't think we've hit it, hit that. In the past, we've had discussions about, are we hitting specific numbers or not? What we said is, you have to look at multiple factors. One of them being that our ARPU is a substantially higher than what we projected by like 25%. What we said was, ultimately, we thought we'd get to the target that we thought and that the combination of that plus the higher ARPU was going to get us the returns we wanted. So we've expressed this before. We're pretty happy with where we are. We think we'll earn the return that we aimed for when we started the project. But the combination of parameters is going to be a little bit different than the exact ones that we thought. And that's kind of what happens across all of our businesses. We aim sort of for the end result, and we don't always get there exactly the way we thought.
Elizabeth Grenfell - BofA Merrill Lynch, Research Division
Analyst · Bank of America.
Okay. And then just one other question for you. The FCC report that you mentioned in your release I think also talked about how the latency issues on ViaSat-1 are about 20x the terrestrial average. And I'm just curious what you're doing to address that and if that will also be the case on ViaSat-2?
Mark D. Dankberg
Management
Yes. So the -- what they --the one thing they report is a metric called ping time, and that's a measure of latency. Satellite, because of the round trip delay to the satellite, that is pretty much -- that's the bugaboo of satellite is the ping time. Our ping times I think are in the 600-ish millisecond time range, and what you might see is more in the 20 to 30 millisecond time from terrestrial. The one thing that people used to think that will be manifested in is slower responsiveness, for instance for web pages. But what the FCC measured, there was another chart in there that showed that the average page load time in Exede 12, even in the busiest hours was something like about 1.5 seconds to 2 seconds off of the best fiber systems. And actually, significantly faster than most DSL systems. So the ping time issue, primarily the main manifestation of that is in what you'd call fast-twitch multiplayer games, shoot-them-up games. One of the things that we do when we try to attract new subscribers is to let those subscribers know that if that's important to them, this isn't a good choice for them. That's one of the things -- and as we get better at that, we sort of pre-filter our subscribers. It's one of the ways that we manage churn when we introduce new channels. But that fast-twitch game is probably the only real manifestation of that ping time. Does that answer that question?
Elizabeth Grenfell - BofA Merrill Lynch, Research Division
Analyst · Bank of America.
Yes.
Operator
Operator
The next question comes from Chris Quilty with Raymond James. Chris Quilty - Raymond James & Associates, Inc., Research Division: I had a question. Can you help walk me through -- I'm looking at the Satellite Services business. You had a good quarter in terms of net adds, revenues up 9% sequentially, but your EBITDA kind of reversed path from its historic trend and was actually down 8% sequentially. And I'm assuming that reflects a higher SAC cost. Can you help explain that?
Shawn Lynn Duffy
Management
Yes, totally. I mean, one of the things that we talked a little bit last quarter was that quarter-over-quarter as our gross adds grow on an incremental percentage higher rate, the impact to the current quarter's EBITDA is going to grow as well. So while the sub base and the higher revenues definitely are driving higher contribution, the high percent of gross adds will actually have near-term impact, and then they start to have their recovery in the following period. Chris Quilty - Raymond James & Associates, Inc., Research Division: Okay. Now does the actual SAC per customer you've talked about being between $600 to $800 sort of range, if I'm running the numbers right, you've moved up significantly towards the higher end of the range in the quarter?
Richard A. Baldridge
Analyst
We've been up there, and we talked about that a little back. We were a little over $700, and then we brought DIRECTV on. Mark talked about different channels, and we've got a lower channel. We've brought on -- we're expanding in our new direct channel, and that's lowering -- so it's a blend, and it's going to depend on who in the quarter. But we're still in that range. I think you've got to look at all the adds in the period, and we had a huge increase quarter-over-quarter in gross subs versus the prior quarter which drove that. And you're just not going to overcome that when we're in this kind of a ramp. Chris Quilty - Raymond James & Associates, Inc., Research Division: Okay. It sounds like the net adds are going to go down seasonally in Q2. And it would probably be fair to assume we'll see the SG&A tick back also?
Shawn Lynn Duffy
Management
Yes. Go ahead.
Mark D. Dankberg
Management
The component of that due to the gross add rate, that contribution will go down if the gross adds go down.
Richard A. Baldridge
Analyst
The best way to generate really good earnings growth right now is to slow our subscriber growth in the near term.
Mark D. Dankberg
Management
But that's not what we want to do. Chris Quilty - Raymond James & Associates, Inc., Research Division: Exactly. Shawn, can you give us the actual number of subs on ViaSat-1 at the end of the quarter?
Shawn Lynn Duffy
Management
Yes, sure. It was about -- it's in about 295,000, 297,000 right around there. Chris Quilty - Raymond James & Associates, Inc., Research Division: Okay. And a question on the ViaSat-2. Is the technology on ViaSat-2 and 1, it sounds like there's some clear differentiation. Is it fair to assume everything is backward and forward compatible between the 2 systems or are they going to be discrete modems that don't interact?
Mark D. Dankberg
Management
It will be like what we did with -- when we did ViaSat-1, when we moved from WildBlue-1 and Anik F2, is that if you want to take advantage of the features of the new satellite, you'll need new networking equipment. And networking equipment will be backwards compatible. But the old equipment won't deliver the new features on the new satellite. Now because we've been planning for this, we'll have the ability to introduce new equipment even before we have the new satellite. So the new CPE will work on old network, yes. Chris Quilty - Raymond James & Associates, Inc., Research Division: Okay. So I mean it brings up a question on the aeronautical portion. First of all, has -- have you gotten that antenna and the radome certified with the FAA yet?
Richard A. Baldridge
Analyst
The terminal, I think we're done. I think the real issue is the radome with the FAA, which LiveTV is doing. And I think that, I think that they have a resolution for that. You'd have to ask them. But I think that's resolved. That's why I think we'll go into service in this summer. Chris Quilty - Raymond James & Associates, Inc., Research Division: Okay. So I guess the question is, right now you've got an aviation solution where on the East and West Coast you've got a lot of capacity on ViaSat-1, but in the center of the country, you're dependent upon WildBlue, which obviously doesn't have nearly the throughput or capacity. And it sounds like ViaSat-2 isn't going to provide you an ability to seamlessly backfill the center of the country because it's going to be a different modem technology. Is that correct?
Mark D. Dankberg
Management
Yes. But I wouldn't look at it that way. The thing that the new satellite really will do for us is the ocean coverage. So as an example, I think we talked about in the press release is that, let's take JetBlue. JetBlue has a bunch of flights that either go up and down the East Coast, say, from New York or Boston and Florida. They actually fly out over the ocean as part of that, or they may go to the Caribbean. So there's an area where we just don't have coverage on any satellites. So that provides a pretty compelling reason to do an upgrade to those terminals. And that upgrade, I think, in the context of functional capability is going to be pretty attractive. Chris Quilty - Raymond James & Associates, Inc., Research Division: Okay. Clearly, a much better opportunity than the geographical coverage you have today, but the big question is, aircraft being mobile, not everybody is going to stay on an Atlantic route and be one to invest in equipment if it's going to be limited to those areas. Does it make sense to? And is there something on the planning map to come up with a dual band Ka, Ku-type of solution? Is that doable?
Mark D. Dankberg
Management
Yes. Number one is, that's doable. I think as a matter of fact I think you'll see that from us. Now whether or not that makes -- that will make a lot of sense for a lot of our government customers, whether or not that makes sense for commercial customers, we'll see. But I think that more significantly, what we're trying to show is, there have been assertions in the past that you can't have really high-capacity and really big coverage. And what we're trying sell is, hey, if you have the right technology, you can. And we're not going to cover the whole world instantly, but what we are going to do is cover increasing parts of it, plus we can blend together the service areas of our partners like Eutelsat as an example or Arabsat. So I think what you'll see is more and more of the globe, especially the interesting parts of the globe, being covered by sort of this seamless coverage. That's how we think it will play out. Chris Quilty - Raymond James & Associates, Inc., Research Division: Okay. And did I understand you correctly that you are going to market basically with Boeing to sell the 702 satellite proprietary design you have to other customers or were you just talking about infrastructure and modems to third parties?
Mark D. Dankberg
Management
What we said is, we have an agreement with Boeing, and think of it as, unlike in the past, Boeing is not going to go off and say, hey, we got this satellite, do you want to go buy it? It's going to be a cooperative agreement between us and Boeing. What we think is that the combinations of coverage, capacity and flexibility will be pretty attractive to anybody looking for a Ka-band broadband satellite, and that we'll do that together. Now what that exactly means in terms of how people ultimately contract for pieces of the system, we'll deal with on a case-by-case basis. But the basic idea is that it will be a system sale. Chris Quilty - Raymond James & Associates, Inc., Research Division: And expected mass of this satellite or are you going to be kind of locked into Ariane 5 or Proton as your option?
Mark D. Dankberg
Management
No. Actually, the launch mass of the satellite and the launch candidates for the satellite are going to be very, very similar to ViaSat-1. Chris Quilty - Raymond James & Associates, Inc., Research Division: Okay. And final question here, the subscribers, oh, crap I got that one, sorry about that. Oh, you mentioned on the government business that you're likely to see a little bit of a profit decline this year. Can you just give us sort of order of magnitude, is that modestly down 10% or 20% down?
Mark D. Dankberg
Management
I'd say it's more modest, in there. Chris Quilty - Raymond James & Associates, Inc., Research Division: Okay. Modest it is.
Operator
Operator
Thank you. This concludes our question-and-answer session. I'll turn it back to management for closing remarks.
Mark D. Dankberg
Management
That pretty much concludes all the stuff that we had to say. We really thank everybody for their time and attention and look forward to talking to you again next quarter.
Operator
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, thanks for participating in today's program. This concludes the program. You may all disconnect.