Iridium Announces 2004 Revenue and Subscriber Growth
Iridium Satellite LLC said that it had more than 114,000 subscribers as of December 31, 2004, a 22.5% increase over its total number of subscribers at the end of 2003.
The company’s revenue for the full-year 2004 increased by 23.2% over total revenue for the prior year.
The company also ended 2004 with positive EBITDA (Earnings Before Income Taxes Depreciation and Amortisation) versus negative EBITDA in 2003 – a positive change of more than US$20 million.
Of particular importance, demand for Iridium’s data services grew sharply. In fact, in 2004, our data usage grew 49% over 2003.
Iridium highlighted the following initiatives that are underway for 2005:
The company will be completing the development of a new netted push-to-talk communications architecture, which allows one user to talk (or transmit data) to many users simultaneously.
This architecture will provide an efficient broadcast service within a designated region for military, homeland security and commercial applications requiring netted voice and data communications. Iridium expects to make this innovative service available in the fourth quarter of 2005.
In the second half of 2005, Iridium will launch a new lower cost data modem for short-burst data communications. This data module will leverage the 100% global coverage of the Iridium network and will feature low latency, two-way communications, broadcast and high throughput data capabilities.
