Earnings Labs

Viasat, Inc. (VSAT)

Q2 2014 Earnings Call· Mon, Nov 11, 2013

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the ViaSat's Fiscal Year 2014 Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call. Your host for today's call is Mr. Mark Dankberg, CEO. You may now begin, Mr. Dankberg.

Mark D. Dankberg

Management

Okay, thanks. Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to our earnings call. I'm Mark Dankberg, I'm Chairman and CEO, and I've got with me Rick Baldridge, our President and Chief Operating Officer; Bruce Dirks, our Chief Financial Officer; Shawn Duffy, our Chief Accounting Officer; and Keven Lippert, our General Counsel. Before we start, Keven will provide our Safe Harbor disclosure.

Keven K. Lippert

Management

Thanks, Mark. This discussion contains forward-looking statements. And as a reminder, the 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. Back to you, Mark.

Mark D. Dankberg

Management

Okay. Thanks, Keven. So as usual, we'll be referring to the slides that are available over the web, and I'll start with some highlights and a top level business overview. And after that, Shawn will discuss our financial results and then I'll give a little more depth on each of our business segments. And then finally, I'll summarize our outlook and we'll take questions. So once again, we're pretty happy with our quarterly results, which were good across all of our reporting segments. We set a record for revenues again at $354 million. That's up 25% year-over-year for the second quarter, and we're up 29% year-over-year on a year-to-date basis. Adjusted EBITDA also set a new record for us at $54 million, and that's up 22% from the same time last year and up 44% year-to-date. New orders for the quarter were also very good at $391 million. Our Exede consumer broadband service achieved 92,000 gross adds, and that's up 68% compared to last year. Net adds were a little over 41,000 and we ended the quarter with about 591,000 subscribers, with about 430,000 of those on ViaSat-1. ARPU increased about 6% year-over-year, primarily as a result of our higher retail mix, but we're also beginning to see some positive contribution from the VoIP service we introduced last quarter. Our Commercial and Government segments also did well, with good results across a broad range of products and projects. In Commercial Networks, we grew in consumer terminals, in-flight broadband terminals and the Ka-band satellite payload project. That segment also had strong new orders. Our Government Systems segment revenue is still growing, which is pretty remarkable in this incredibly stressful budget environment. New orders growth in Government Systems was also very strong, more than doubling from last quarter, and illustrating again how lumpy things are in that segment. As we noted last quarter, we're increasing investments in new technology, network expansions and in litigation expenses to protect and our -- and extend our technology competitive positions. So with that overview, Shawn will give a description of the financials, and then I'll come back with more detailed highlights in each of the business segments.

Shawn Lynn Duffy

Management

Thanks, Mark. Our fiscal 2014 second quarter results were very strong at the top line, down to our core operating performance. Revenues grew by 25% year-over-year and 10% sequentially, with both our Satellite Services and Commercial Network segments achieving new revenue records. Q2 adjusted EBITDA grew 22% year-over-year to $54 million as our consumer subscriber base continues to expand, and we drive growth across multiple markets within our other segments. If we look to the quarter-over-quarter results, we can also see the strength of our operating leverage pushing through, generating sequential adjusted EBITDA growth despite heavier upfront stock expenses associated with this quarter's strong retail gross adds and increased discretionary investments and litigation expense focused on protecting and extending our technology advantages. Turning to our year-to-date results, the financial backdrop's pretty consistent with our Q2 performance. Revenues were up 29% and adjusted EBITDA growth accelerated to $107 million, up 44% for the 6-month period. Margins improved on a year-to-date basis despite increased discretionary investments, driven by the broad top line growth we're seeing across our business segments. Moving to our P&L as a whole and looking into our revenue mix, both product and service revenues grew about 25%. Our product revenue growth occurred within both our government and commercial segments, while the service revenue growth was delivered from our scaling sub base within Satellite Services. We expect this mix of growth to continue throughout FY '14 as we progress in our large scale infrastructure projects, such as NBN in Australia, and recent integrated ground station wins in our Antenna Systems group. As we see in our Q2 results, our expanding service revenues drove improved contribution margins as cost of revenues decreased by 2.6 percentage points year-over-year. This improvement was offset by increases in SG&A and R&D. As we have seen…

Mark D. Dankberg

Management

Okay. Thanks, Shawn. So we'll start with the Satellite Services segment. And overall, we're pretty happy with the performance of this segment. Revenue growth is still good; it's up 49% from the same period last year. And we're seeing some of the benefits of scale as adjusted EBITDA more than doubled over the same timeframe. Gross adds were good at 92,000, with just over 100,000 installations. And migrations seem to be tapering. As we've discussed in the past, growth in our retail gross adds results in a onetime SAC expense, which cuts into adjusted EBITDA growth in those periods. Those current period SAC expenses, along with higher legal expenses, is what's caused the flattening you see in sequential quarter-over-quarter EBITDA for this particular quarter in the chart on the lower left-hand corner. ARPU is continuing to increase on a year-over-year and a sequential basis. We're aiming to achieve that through higher value service plans and adjacent offerings, such as VoIP, as opposed to retail price increases. Unit economics are still pretty much in line with expectations. With a growing subscriber base and increasing ARPU, we've crossed the $100 million mark in Satellite Services for the quarter. Churn for this quarter was higher than where we'd like it to be in the long term, and I'll give some insight into the causes and approaches to that on our next slide. Overall, we can expect to see variations in subscriber acquisition and retention dynamics as we test and measure different approaches to the market. We introduced our VoIP service last quarter on a limited basis as a bundled offering through our direct sales channel. We're not yet marketing it broadly, and we're still working on scaling fulfillment. But the initial attachment rates and subscriber response are encouraging, and we're aiming to scale…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And it looks like our first question on the phone will come from Rich Valera with Needham & Company. Richard Valera - Needham & Company, LLC, Research Division: First, I just wanted to see if you could give us the migrations number. I think you mentioned it was trending down, but if you could give us a feel for what that number was.

Mark D. Dankberg

Management

I think this quarter, it was around 9,000 ballpark. Richard Valera - Needham & Company, LLC, Research Division: Okay. And then just sort of relatedly, the churn number, wondered how sort of when you started to see the higher churn and if you've already started tuning your plans as we speak and should we -- it sounds like you said it may stay higher, but should we assume that the subs that you're adding today presumably have a more sticky profile than the ones that, maybe you added a couple of quarters ago, that resulted in a higher churn, so you're already, in essence, addressing that higher churn as we speak?

Mark D. Dankberg

Management

Yes, the -- so the churn is, as I said in the presentation, it's -- it varies a lot depending on basically where we pull our subscribers from and what alternatives that they have. People that use a lot of bandwidth -- or were using a lot of bandwidth already, especially if they came from like a good cable network or even a fiber network, those are the ones that are most likely to churn. So what we've been doing is, one is analyzing that. And there are a couple of other factors that we can use as well to predict it. So we've analyzed it, sort of have a sense of [ph] confirming it. Now, going back and implementing it across our acquisition channels is a little bit complicated and involves multiple factors. And not all of those fixes take hold the very first time we try them. So that's kind of -- where we are now is we're implementing them, some of them our partners are implementing. We think it could take another quarter before we really see the changes that we're making now take effect in the segments that we're most trying to address. Richard Valera - Needham & Company, LLC, Research Division: Okay, that's helpful. And then your gross adds actually jumped quite nicely sequentially, which was, frankly, a bit surprising given that this was the first quarter you were essentially sharing the DIRECTV channel with Hughes. So just wondered if you could talk about your overall sort of gross -- your installations and how we should think about that number going forward? And if there's any color you can provide on DIRECTV, which, again, doesn't seem like there was much of a blip there.

Mark D. Dankberg

Management

We don't want to -- I think, for competitive reasons, we're not going to go into too much detail. There's -- there are a number of different factors involved, which it's -- one of them being that there's a fairly predictable amount of capacity available on our satellite and the Hughes satellite, which is very, very similar to ours. And so the fact that there's a finite amount of capacity and there seems to be good demand has an impact on how it's playing out. And I don't think things are going to change a whole lot. I mean, I think the biggest factors will just be sort of the rate at which different beams fill up and how we all manage through that. But I think that overall dynamics aren't going to change that much. And I think both DIRECTV and DISH are realizing that satellite broadband is a good companion to satellite TV, and they're both pretty interested in having that work well across both suppliers. Richard Valera - Needham & Company, LLC, Research Division: Great. And one final one on ARPU, if I could. ARPU, as you noted, was sort of a pleasant surprise and seeing some lift you mentioned from VoIP. I know you don't want to give specific guidance, but how -- if you had to think about ARPU, a few quarters from now or 1 year from now, would you assume that it likely keeps going up as you, perhaps, get better attach rates on VoIP or the mix improves towards some sort of higher end product? I mean, how do you think about ARPU looking out a few quarters or a year?

Mark D. Dankberg

Management

Yes, I think that we have opportunities to steadily improve ARPU, not super dramatically. It'll depend on the introduction of these new services. And that's really our main objective is to sort of introduce more value than price, in some sense, going forward. We're trying to do that through the VoIP, through the Evolution plans that we talked about. And I think we have a couple of other ways to go. And I think that for the -- relative to the speeds that we're offering, I think we have a pretty attractive price and there's opportunities to increase our ARPU and still deliver good value, which is -- that's the effect we're trying to achieve.

Operator

Operator

Our next phone question will come from Yair Reiner with Oppenheimer. Yair Reiner - Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., Research Division: So if you could help me with the math on the Satellite Services, you have about 41,000 subs more on average in the quarter. It seems that, that should provide a quarter-on-quarter growth of about $6 million or $7 million, but you obviously reported growth significantly higher than that. What is the delta there that gets us to that $15 million of quarter-on-quarter growth?

Shawn Lynn Duffy

Management

So are you -- you're talking from the top line revenue growth? Yair Reiner - Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., Research Division: Yes, in Satellite Services.

Shawn Lynn Duffy

Management

Yes, so I think it's predicated just on the mix of the subs. And we're continuing to see the retail subs drive upward, which is driving the ARPU. So that, with the weighted average sub [ph] growth, that's the -- that's the biggest drivers.

Richard A. Baldridge

Analyst

I'd say -- Yair, this is Rick. I'd that it's more dependent on where we ended the last quarter than where we ended the current quarter. I mean, it has some of that in there, but...

Shawn Lynn Duffy

Management

Timing impact.

Richard A. Baldridge

Analyst

Yes, so it's a combination of both of those. So you can't really just look at the current quarter adds and get there. Yair Reiner - Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., Research Division: Got it. So I guess that implies that the June quarter was probably back-half loaded? Is that fair?

Richard A. Baldridge

Analyst

I don't think so. No, it's not. You just have to integrate it. It's -- you have to integrate the...

Shawn Lynn Duffy

Management

A full quarter of the prior quarter subs.

Richard A. Baldridge

Analyst

A full quarter of the prior quarter subs plus -- I mean, if you said it was even, roughly 50%, of the current quarter, an average of 50% of the current quarter subs and blended between retail and wholesale. So it's not -- you can't just take the net adds in the current quarter and get to the revenue growth. Yair Reiner - Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., Research Division: Understood. And then can you give us a sense of the wholesale retail mix in the quarter and how that's trending?

Mark D. Dankberg

Management

No, we're not going to break it out explicitly. We're still mostly retail, and it varies from quarter-to-quarter, depending on a bunch of factors, a lot of which are under the control of the satellite TV companies themselves. Yair Reiner - Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., Research Division: Okay. And then just one last one for me for now. Legal costs, I know you've called those out the last couple of quarters. I know that maybe before you go into litigation, you probably don't want to give us an exact number. But can you give us a sense maybe for the year of what you're looking at towards [ph] this legal expense just so we can have a baseline going into 2015?

Shawn Lynn Duffy

Management

Yes, I think what we've talked about and we kind of mentioned last quarter is that the impacts to this year are going to be more significant clearly than they were last year. Q2 was kind of a ramp-up in the activities as we started working through the discovery part of the case and closing that out in this quarter. So I think what we're going to -- we're going to continue to see a lift in those impacts in each of the quarters and definitely higher for the year. This quarter was a little -- definitely a higher quarter than the sequential quarter, and it's really going to be based on the timing of the actual case, whether it happens at the end of this year or into the beginning of next year.

Operator

Operator

Our next phone question will come from Tim Quillin with Stephens.

Timothy J. Quillin - Stephens Inc., Research Division

Analyst

With regards to churn, is there -- are we seeing any difference between the churn rates in the wholesale channel versus the retail channel? As I recall in a couple of quarters in fiscal '13, you'd had some issues around the timing of the reported deletions from your wholesale partners. Is there any difference right now between churn in the channels?

Mark D. Dankberg

Management

No, I would attribute different -- I would attribute churn more towards the market segments themselves. And it's really the factor that I described, which is sort of our plans relative to the alternatives that the subscribers have. And it's because of the headline number, which is 12 megabits a second for $50 is attractive. And so we're trying to make sure that subscribers understand what the volume limitations are. That's primarily the biggest issue. Now, between the 2 satellite TV companies, DISH tends to skew more rural than DIRECTV, and so that would have implications about what their choices are. But I would say that it's really -- that the issues really have to do with subscriber alternatives as opposed to the TV channel itself.

Timothy J. Quillin - Stephens Inc., Research Division

Analyst

Right. And it -- but it sounds like some of your -- either your retail partners or your call centers are not communicating the caps well to potential consumers. Is there any differences in how you do that internally versus how you think external partners might, might be communicating those caps?

Mark D. Dankberg

Management

Yes, when you go -- and one thing is, we've been going into the call centers. And I can tell you that some of the distribution partners that we've had accounted for a way disproportionate amount of churn. And we terminated several of them because we didn't feel that they were taking steps to really deal with the issue. The ones that we have now, we believe that they are, some of them are -- they can be implementation issues. Some can have to do with the way information is presented to the call agents themselves. So it's actually, I would say, a fairly detailed process, and we're going through it in great depth. And I think that's actually one of the things we've come to admire and respect is the depth to which the best ones do that. And so we're adopting those things, but not everything can be changed overnight. And I think we're -- we and the distribution partners that we have that are engaged are -- we're doing a good job, and we'll get there, but it's probably not going to be turned around in a quarter. And also, we're going to -- we're trying different things because we don't want -- we want to present what we have in a favorable light, but just make sure that people understand what the trade offs are.

Timothy J. Quillin - Stephens Inc., Research Division

Analyst

Right, and the answer is that yes, there's the fine print.

Richard A. Baldridge

Analyst

Even some of the worst channels, though, are -- they're profitable and they still can be positive, and so this isn't a horrible problem [ph], this is still and we're learning how people take our service. So it's not -- it's something we're working on improving, but it's not a bad thing.

Mark D. Dankberg

Management

Yes, I want to give -- there's one other point I want to make, which is, the flip side to this thing is one of the things that we're learning is, you put out a good headline offering and lots of people are interested as opposed to the notion of, how are you ever going to sell satellite to people that have a choice? Well, we're finding sort of the flip side, which is, you present a good economic offer, and it's really more an issue of making sure that people understand the trade-offs and where it's a good fit. So we're not anxious to sort of solve the problem in a crude way that diminishes that effect. What we're trying to do is understand sort of what the edges are so that when we make improvements in our service, we know how to go back and get the corresponding interest from potential subscribers and how to deal with that, and that's a little bit why we're dealing with it the way we are. And I think to Rick's point, it's worse than what we're targeting, but the results are still good overall. So it's not like a -- we don't regard it as a crisis. We're just trying to improve it.

Timothy J. Quillin - Stephens Inc., Research Division

Analyst

Great. And just one last question on -- migrations were good, I guess, year-over-year, but up a little bit quarter-over-quarter. You're down to about 160,000 subs or a little over that on the old WildBlue satellite. How many of those subs are in areas where they would not be able to be served by ViaSat-1? So in other words, where is the floor in that business?

Mark D. Dankberg

Management

Yes, we're getting -- and that's a good point. We're getting fairly close to it -- to the floor. Actually, I think that the number of subscribers that we end up with from the legacy satellites is actually going to be influenced a fair amount by some of these alternative uses that we're coming up with, like in-flight Wi-Fi or some of the live events or media-type things that we're doing. But we're getting pretty close to the floor, and the migrations, we think, it's going to continue to taper away.

Operator

Operator

Our next phone question will come from Mike Crawford with B. Riley & Co.

Michael Crawford - B. Riley Caris, Research Division

Analyst

On the Commercial Networks side, you talked about development progress on Ka-band satellite payload. Is that NBN? And where do you stand with NBN, both in terms of kind of percent complete on what's already been booked, plus any status of any discussions to extend what you might be able to do for them?

Mark D. Dankberg

Management

Okay. No, the Ka-band payload project is not NBN. It's a contract that we have with Thales on the Iridium NEXT program, where we're doing the Ka-band feed links and cross-links, which is a very good project for us. On NBN, do you want to take that?

Richard A. Baldridge

Analyst

Yes, there we're in the 30% to 40% complete range. We're through most of the development effort. We're beginning to deploy antennas. The first gateway will go in and be -- begin installed on January 6. It's being shipped early today, I think, or yesterday. It's -- right now, it's being shipped over. Second one's right behind that. So gateway deployment going on. We've moved -- a whole network test facility is installed over in Australia. We have a duplicate one here, so we're going through all the base-end selloff test. So we're right in the middle of integration, a bunch of testing and beginning hardware deployment.

Mark D. Dankberg

Management

And then in terms of the macro picture with NBN, they've had a change in government in the last couple of months. They've -- the new government has expressed a desire to use more of their existing telco infrastructure, do more fiber-to-the-node and a little less fiber-to-the-home on their existing market base, on the existing homes in Australia. Overall, I think that makes for a little bit more unpredictable deployment environment for terrestrial. And the sense is that for satellite, it can create more opportunity. That's predicated on people having a good understanding of the quality of the satellite service, which, as we've seen here, is a little hard to appreciate until you can see it for yourself. But I think overall, it creates a more favorable environment for us long term.

Michael Crawford - B. Riley Caris, Research Division

Analyst

Okay. And then you've also in the past talked about some other big NBN-sized or actually bigger-than-NBN opportunities. Can you elaborate on either what any of these might be or what any potential timing could be related to these opportunities?

Mark D. Dankberg

Management

No, we're not going to go -- I don't think it'd be a good idea for us to go into them by name. The basic idea is that once we've put out sort of the overall objective that we're setting out to achieve with ViaSat-2, there are people that -- who have been looking at other satellite broadband satellites that go, "Wow. If you can really do that, that's pretty impressive." So that's kind of the basis of the discussions that we've had, and we've been really happy in working with Boeing. I think one of the typical things people -- we've had people going to visit Boeing and saying, "Will it really do this? Can that really be done?" And so we think that's sort of a necessary step to get people to be comfortable with what the capabilities are. It's an expensive satellite, but the functional capability is we think the best available and for a few big opportunities where people are looking at that scale, that's -- those are the kind of things that we're engaged in. We just don't know what the timing would be and whether or not they'll come to fruition, but we're happy that we're having these types of engagements for the right reasons. I think that's what's encouraging at this point.

Richard A. Baldridge

Analyst

And Boeing has done a good job from a team standpoint of representing ViaSat and Boeing as a team in pursuing these.

Michael Crawford - B. Riley Caris, Research Division

Analyst

And kind of -- and I guess, adjacent to that, you've talked about a desire to perhaps obtain capacity on new Ka-band systems, preferably using the ViaSat-2 architecture sold by you and Boeing. Is there -- is that something that still remains quite a ways off before we could see any news on that front, or is that kind of coming up closer on the horizon?

Mark D. Dankberg

Management

We look at -- the opportunities that we're looking at are that they would start before ViaSat-2 is launched in some time. Maybe some of them could start within a year. It's just, it's a little bit hard to tell. Depends on what -- depends on catalysts and budgets with each of the opportunities we're looking at, but there are 2 or 3 of them in play, so that's a good number at this point.

Michael Crawford - B. Riley Caris, Research Division

Analyst

Okay. Final question, related -- regarding in-flight broadband. Have you had any talks with carriers that already have a mobile broadband offering, but who might want to offer a materially improved service?

Mark D. Dankberg

Management

Yes, yes. I mean, usually the context for that is in fleet expansion or adding to their fleet or swapping out their fleet. And I think that when that happens, they're definitely interested in what's available at the time. And so I think that gives us entrées into pretty much all the carriers. I think a lot of it's going to be influenced by the first deployments that we'll see with JetBlue and then United. I think those will have a pretty big influence when people can fly around and actually see how it works. So we're getting close there, but we're not -- it's hard to expect things to move too fast before that happens. We have one thing that is kind of cool is, because there is an airplane flying around that's equipped, people from the airlines have flown on that airplane just to see how it works, and that's been encouraging. So I think that people are getting a sense of what's possible.

Operator

Operator

Our next phone question will come from Matt Robison with Wunderlich.

Matthew S. Robison - Wunderlich Securities Inc., Research Division

Analyst

Can you maybe talk -- well first of all, congratulations on the government bookings. That was pretty stunning. And are we -- do we just kind of not really know how the pipeline develops from here and just sort of take it as it comes? Or do you think we can have further sort of catch-up on the bookings in the current quarter?

Mark D. Dankberg

Management

So as far as the bookings go, things are not -- they're not just appearing that we're not expecting. The thing that's happening is we're working on opportunities with specific customers or to extend opportunities with existing customers. And there's just a lot of uncertainty in when they'll have budget available, what the authorities are for using that budget given the continuing resolution, the sort of the wind-down in some of these urgent needs spending authorities. So things are moving around. And it just makes it hard for them to be able to predict when things are going to actually close. And that's a big part of what accounts for the lumpiness. The part that's good that we're trying to convey is that we've had opportunities for things. I'll give -- one example would be like things that were Joint Tactical Radio System applications where it becomes more evident that either the program of record isn't going to be able to deliver, won't be able to deliver in the time frame, or that the target price points don't fit the budget for the application. And people are coming back and saying, "Well, I understand you've got this. And how can that be made to work?" And so we're seeing more of those kinds of opportunities, and that's what gives us some sense of confidence that things will grow. But it's really hard to predict what the trajectory of the funding will be for them. There's quite of few things in the works, and we're not trying to convey a change in our view of what it is. We're just trying to convey the uncertainty in the timing.

Matthew S. Robison - Wunderlich Securities Inc., Research Division

Analyst

Well, yes, I mean, it sounds like that's your kind of -- core to your value proposition, things like that. So on the Commercial Networks, since you're so far along with NBN and with some pretty major milestones, it sounds like, coming in the next few weeks or next couple of quarters, should we kind of assume that you're going to have another couple more strong quarters like this in the near term?

Richard A. Baldridge

Analyst

Can you -- did you understand?

Shawn Lynn Duffy

Management

I think I got your question. I think what you're going to see is, what we've talked about before is NBN was going to kind of scale kind of as we were building throughout FY '14, and then we may see kind of some curtailing of that as we enter into '15. So I think that we're going to see some continued strong trends. We also have, though, we've had some good successes in some of our terminal revenues as well, stemming out of the surfing, as well as some of our younger products. So those can be lumpy as well and kind of push 1 quarter one way or another.

Bruce Dirks

Analyst

I think it's pretty hard to predict.

Matthew S. Robison - Wunderlich Securities Inc., Research Division

Analyst

[indiscernible] what we should be thinking about for taxes [indiscernible] of these benefits?

Shawn Lynn Duffy

Management

Sure. Yes, I can walk through that a little bit. So overall, what we discussed is that the current quarter had a onetime effect of this discrete item on the valuation allowance for state taxes. But overall, if you look kind of out to the rest of the year, which is kind of in line to what we've disclosed before, taking into consideration the R&D credits, we expect the rate's probably going to be around 80%. It can move based on different dynamics of the R&D credit to the income, but -- and the effect of the discrete items, but if you look out to the year, it's around there.

Matthew S. Robison - Wunderlich Securities Inc., Research Division

Analyst

You said 80%?

Shawn Lynn Duffy

Management

Yes, as you're closing on them. And that's just on [ph] from the effective rate perspective, but again it's very -- it's conditioned with the effects of the discrete items.

Matthew S. Robison - Wunderlich Securities Inc., Research Division

Analyst

Well, 80%, you mean -- so 80% of 35% or 40%, is that what you mean?

Shawn Lynn Duffy

Management

Yes, so to go back to kind of the elements that we've talked about before, you just need to look to the statutory rates. And then because the R&D tax credit is effective through the end of December, and we're using an effective rate method, those benefits are formulated within the rest of the year results.

Matthew S. Robison - Wunderlich Securities Inc., Research Division

Analyst

Okay. Rich, maybe this one's for you. How do you see the pace of LiveTV with United versus JetBlue, and how do you expect the split to go between Gogo and Exede for United?

Richard A. Baldridge

Analyst

United's not using Gogo except for on a few [ph] PES [ph] aircraft. They chose Panasonic and a Ku option for the United deal, the old United aircraft side of the fleet. And they chose a LiveTV, ViaSat Ka-band on the continental, the old continental side of the fleet. And then there are some aircraft in the middle that are up for grabs that's a dark aircraft that hasn't has been selected yet. And we hope that once they start flying the United airplanes that we'll get those.

Matthew S. Robison - Wunderlich Securities Inc., Research Division

Analyst

So you don't see that Gogo will get any incremental traction with their GTO offering at United.

Richard A. Baldridge

Analyst

No, I don't -- I'm not forecasting Gogo. I'm obviously horrible at forecasting Gogo's offering but...

Matthew S. Robison - Wunderlich Securities Inc., Research Division

Analyst

So that when United's advertising their satellite service they're offering now, they're talking about at the current moment Panasonic, it sounds like.

Richard A. Baldridge

Analyst

Panasonic, yes. Ku-band satellite.

Matthew S. Robison - Wunderlich Securities Inc., Research Division

Analyst

Yes, sure. And then last question for me is, what quarter are we, is our current thinking for the ViaSat-2 launch?

Mark D. Dankberg

Management

Well, so the satellite construction schedule should be first half of 2016. Sort of in early or middle first half-ish of 2016 according to the current schedule. The launch would probably be hopefully right around the middle of the year.

Operator

Operator

Our next question will come from the line of Chris Quilty with Raymond James. Chris Quilty - Raymond James & Associates, Inc., Research Division: Just a thought on that last question, have you announced the launch provider yet?

Mark D. Dankberg

Management

No, we have not. Chris Quilty - Raymond James & Associates, Inc., Research Division: Okay, and you have quite a bit of time before you have to make that decision, contingent on getting the right launch slot.

Mark D. Dankberg

Management

Yes. Chris Quilty - Raymond James & Associates, Inc., Research Division: So a question on churn. If I ran the numbers right here, it looks like WildBlue was down about 30,000 subs, which means net of migrations, you were down about 20 on the -- or 20,000 churn on the ViaSat-1 satellite. And I guess my question is twofold. Number one, are those numbers right? But since the satellite's been in service for less than 2 years and generally, people are signing a 2-year lease contract, how does that work in terms of recapturing equipment? Are you able to do that? And how does that impact the accounting of those particular customers? And the second part of the question is with your reseller partners, was there something -- some kind of provision written into the contract, whereby there was a hook on the back end. So they might get a commission if they sign up somebody, but if the guy doesn't stay for his 2 years, you get a claw back?

Mark D. Dankberg

Management

Okay. So there's a bunch of good things in there. So one is when we look at churn, we think about this issue that we described, which is sort of, for whatever reason, a mismatch in expectations from people who are coming from, say, a cable- or fiber-based solution to satellite. That manifests itself pretty soon. And people that find themselves in that situation are pretty much terminating well ahead of the 2-year schedule. So there is a termination fee associated with that, and we have the right to recover the equipment. We don't recover 100% of it. We look at our actuals on the recovery, and we do true-up our costs and our recovery -- we true-up our recovery costs and expense the stuff that we can recover as it happens. And that -- I think we've done a pretty good job on that. Things move around a little bit, but I think we account for that the way we should. The biggest issue on that churn, on that front on churn, and this is the issue we talked about, is really that upfront sort of qualification process of trying to match our service to subscribers that would be a good match. When we sell wholesale, the retailers really bear that risk; when we sell retail through the agents or other distribution partners, we bear that risk. In general, what we find is that the best of the distribution channels don't like the churn any more than we do, and they work with us to bring it down. We do have provisions or retention provisions in our agency agreements that are intended to cover this. And we may change those or introduce different incentives from time to time to help deal with the issue. But we think that the #1 issue is really the whole step-by-step process by which we attract, qualify and enroll subscribers. So we're looking at it holistically. Does that answer your question there? Chris Quilty - Raymond James & Associates, Inc., Research Division: It does. I'm just thinking back to the early days. I was really impressed that, at the time you were pulling in, 40% or so of your subs, when you pulled them were coming from terrestrial subscribers and clearly some of those guys weren't good catches, but, I guess, if you were able to tool the marketing and the sign-up process, do you still think the business model and the plans that you've devised would support bringing in a significant number, I don't know if it's 40%, of your subscribers as terrestrial flips rather than saying, "Wait a second, maybe we need to retool this entire thought process and maybe go after more the really unserved or super unserved customers"?

Mark D. Dankberg

Management

Look, in general, one of the things that we've found is, over time, that the fraction of subscribers we're getting that do have terrestrial alternatives has gone up from that 40%. It's significantly higher. And when we look at that increase and where those subscribers are coming from, we are able to pretty much deduce what the issues are and where we're deploying them from. And that's sort of the root of the approach we're taking to manage that problem, the problem being that people who are high-bandwidth users who come from good choices tend to churn more quickly. So, we're -- as I mentioned, we're going through this qualification process to deal with that. What we think is, as opposed to retreating away, we find this encouraging, and what we're trying to do is use some new technologies and the increase in bandwidth that we are expecting to get with ViaSat-2 to actually cast a wider net, not a narrower one. That's -- I think that's our long-term plan. We're trying to do it methodically. In some sense, what we're doing is we're facing this market segmentation issue head on: How do we find subscribers that are good fits for us that are substantially beyond just this unserved segment?

Richard A. Baldridge

Analyst

That's it. If ViaSat-1 was a project, we probably wouldn't do it this way. And since it's the first in a series, then this approach is really important. Chris Quilty - Raymond James & Associates, Inc., Research Division: So a learning process?

Mark D. Dankberg

Management

Yes. Chris Quilty - Raymond James & Associates, Inc., Research Division: And just to clarify, are these mainly in terms of retargeting who you're going after, these are mainly soft costs? Or are there some kind of implications for a higher SAC in order to get the targeted customers?

Mark D. Dankberg

Management

No, no, we won't [indiscernible].

Richard A. Baldridge

Analyst

I think we said they've improved. Chris Quilty - Raymond James & Associates, Inc., Research Division: Okay. I know you don't provide guidance, but just to clarify -- sorry, not Q4. The December quarter is traditionally up sequentially in terms of net adds?

Richard A. Baldridge

Analyst

Yes, last year was a really good quarter for us. Chris Quilty - Raymond James & Associates, Inc., Research Division: Okay, and Shawn, can you give us perhaps target CapEx spending for the full fiscal year?

Shawn Lynn Duffy

Management

Yes, I think what we've talked about is the milestones on ViaSat-2 are going to be a big driver. I think what you're seeing in the Q2 results is that the CPE spend was a little bit down to Q1, even with the gross adds. And we talked about those dynamics a little bit before with the redeployment of some of our CPE as we get new subscribers. So I think if you kind of look at where we were Q2 and consider those dynamics continuing to happen in a slightly progressive rate a little bit. And then probably for ViaSat-2, looking at what we did for Q2, we're going to see those things happen for Q3, Q4 as well. But again, it's going to be based on milestones and they're significant, so we can have some fall into next year. Chris Quilty - Raymond James & Associates, Inc., Research Division: So not a range?

Shawn Lynn Duffy

Management

Yes, I think, specifically, I think it can move a lot. So probably -- yes, I think it's probably better sense to look at our Q2 trends and kind of look at that out to Q3, Q4. Chris Quilty - Raymond James & Associates, Inc., Research Division: Okay, and final question on the Government Systems, it looks like the service-related business was down about 20% sequentially, 15% year-over-year. You had a pretty huge step up in the service revenues over the preceding year, 1.5 years. And I know you had talked about some revenue risk as we withdraw out of Afghanistan. Is this probably the floor on where you would expect those service revenues to trend, or is there more downside as we continue to withdraw?

Mark D. Dankberg

Management

No, we had -- so we have different business areas that contribute to our overall services. One of the things that we talked about last year was we provided bandwidth on an interim basis on Blue Force Tracking 2. And that's pretty much ended I think as a result of that data procurement competition to do that on a sort of under their program of record basis instead of going through us. We might get that again in the future. There'll be opportunities for us to compete for it, but I think that's one of them, if not the major, reason that you're seeing the decline year-over-year. Chris Quilty - Raymond James & Associates, Inc., Research Division: So the actual Command & Control business remains relatively steady?

Mark D. Dankberg

Management

Yes. Well, if you look at the ISR business that we've had in the Command & Control portions of the mobile broadband, the trends have been pretty good in terms of getting more platforms and more users. One of the issues that definitely will come into play is going to be the drawdown from Afghanistan. On the other hand, one of the things that's encouraging is that the users have found the capability to be really valuable. And there's not a shortage of places in the world that need this kind of a capability. And so part of what's happening is those assets and the corresponding service are looking like they're going to be redeployed in other places.

Operator

Operator

Our next phone question will come from Amy Yong with Macquarie.

Amy Yong - Macquarie Research

Analyst

I have 2 follow-up questions. Number one, what was your end subscriber number on your legacy satellite for the September quarter? And secondly, on in-flight, what maintenance check would install the equipment on the JetBlue and United aircraft? Is it the B or the C Check?

Mark D. Dankberg

Management

Okay. On the first one, we -- well, what we've said we have about 591,000 subscribers at quarter end and about 430,000 of them were on ViaSat-1. So that would be about 160-ish thousand between WildBlue-1 and Anik F2. On the second point, Rick, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but basically, in order to achieve the install tempo that they want, that is to get the WiFi deployed in the fleet, so they're going to do special installations and that they won't be under -- not all of the aircraft will get them on under the normal maintenance cycle.

Amy Yong - Macquarie Research

Analyst

I see. So these would be in addition to the regular maintenance cycles checks that they have?

Richard A. Baldridge

Analyst

Yes, they may reschedule. They may integrate some of the normal maintenance stuff. They might may do some early, for instance because they've got the aircraft out of line. But they're -- that's up to the airline. So we're following their lead on scheduling those, but Mark's right. That tempo and the rate they want to install these things, it doesn't line up with normal maintenance cycles perfectly.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]

Richard A. Baldridge

Analyst

I think we're going to shut it off at this point.

Operator

Operator

Okay, sir. Well at this time, I don't show any additional questions in the queue. I'll turn the program back over to you for any additional or closing remarks.

Mark D. Dankberg

Management

Well, that covers what we had to say for this quarter. Thanks a lot, everybody, for joining our conference, and we look forward to speaking again next quarter.

Operator

Operator

Thank you, presenters, and thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Again, this does conclude today's conference. Thank you for your participation, and have a wonderful day. Attendees, you may now all disconnect.