[AlexDanger]

I'm a big believer in Starlink and SpaceX generally.

It annoys me that I can not invest in these big bold innovations directly. Has anyone thought about how to invest indirectly on the belief that Starlink will succeed? For instance, are there satellite equipment suppliers or other upstream supplier who stand to profit with Starlink's success?

Likewise, who might fail based on Starlink's success? Should I be shorting Satellite based ISPs?

[syedkarim]

There are dozens of custom ICs from STMicroelectronics in each terminal. ST is a public company; NYSE:STM The terminal is also using a large amount of high-frequency substrate. That could be Rogers, but maybe one of the much cheaper Chinese materials. But I don’t think a position should be taken based on what’s inside of a terminal. The real play is in shorting the entire satellite industry.

Every existing satellite operators stands to lose from Starlink’s success. Maybe not SiriusXM. Crazy that their net income is still increasing every year.

Intelsat’s cost per bit is much higher than Starlink’s. They also have much less system capacity.

EchoStar owns HughesNet. NASDAQ: SATS

Eutelsat: same as Intelsat, but with less debt on their books.

SES: Wild card among legacy satellite operators, as they have a new, high capacity (O3B mPower) system in the works.

Viasat’s 3-terabit GEO system should be competitive from a cost-perspective, but latency will be much worse. If price is the same as Starlink, they will lose on quality of connectivity/latency.

Iridium, GlobalStar, Orbcomm. Public companies that focus on narrowband/low bitrate/IoT communications. Much of the use cases can be solved with a Starlink terminal and an IoT hub/gateway, rather than going directly from a small sensor to a satellite.

There are a few public GEO operators in Asia; they’ll have the same problem as the European and American operators.

There’s virtually nothing that these companies can do to compete. They are all procurement specialists, rather than being engineering-led/driven. Most importantly, they all pay full price for launch, whereas SpaceX gets it for not much more than gas-money.

And SpaceX can get way more cash than anyone else at a much cheaper price. It’s tough to fight against that kind of war chest.

[midasuni]

We have hindered a of Inmarsat base stations and sims around the world. Rarely use them, but when we do we are happy to pay for the bandwidth, and we spend a lot each year pre-buying bandwidth whether we use it or not.

They are now moving to charge us a monthly fee per station, not as much as starlink yet, but it seems an odd choice. Perhaps a final squeeze of their customers.

Bgans still have a benefit - smaller than starlink, battery powered, movable, but this latest move has made us reevaluate our satellite strategy, and that’s never a good thing for incumbents.

[AlexDanger]

Fantastic response!

Are you aware of the players in Australia? There is Skymesh (owned by a UK company) but I'm not aware of other players in the Aus market.

Of all of the providers on your list - are any of them doing LEO constellations that are able to provide low latency in the way that Starlink can offer?

One might quibble about cost efficiencies and system capacity, but in the consumer market I cant see how you can argue with the physics advantage of being 50x closer to your customer!

[kalleboo]

Wikipedia has a list of who else has announced LEO constellations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Competition_and_marke...

[mike_d]

Iridium and Global Star make the majority of their money from governments supporting custom use cases and working with OEM partners. Starlink might be a viable alternative in 10 years on the next-gen bidding cycle, but not before.

[syedkarim]

That’s a solid point, though I think there is still a shorting opportunity. If they only have 10 years before revenues start to decline drastically, then their value doesn’t increase. It’s possible that the downward revenue spiral starts sooner than 2030. Maybe. Who knows.

[reducesuffering]

$GOOGL invested in and owns 5-10% of SpaceX. Even if SpaceX is valued at $100B, every $200 you invest in Google would be around a $1 into SpaceX, but if you think SpaceX is going to be the first 10 trillion dollar company or something crazy, it could make sense.

[system2]

I was looking for starlink IPO. There is some good news I read for the last few months. I think it would succeed more than Tesla since it is more global and affordable.

https://observer.com/2021/02/spacex-secret-funds-starlink-ip...