I'll answer this on the chance that someone other than you finds your question serious. I took you off block just to see what everyone was commenting about. Perhaps I'll stay like this.
But, why not sooner:
* You don't need to get it before you need to spend it. SAS have a delivery schedule and don't need money in the bank before they have a need to spend it.
* They can issue equity at any time for the market rate. They've got 160m shares which they can float on the ASX for retail prices. They can do this right up until they run out of money so there is no rush to do it early.
* They can, presumably, get a slight premium to market rates through the run-of-the-mill institutional investors. This is a little more complicated to negotiate, but again can be done at the last minute and doesn't require a long lead time.
* They can, presumably, get an even better premium from someone that sees value in the SAS network beyond equity. For example a telco. A telco could leverage an equity arrangement to also include discounted services or perhaps a revenue sharing arrangement. Of course, buying at a material premium would require additional certainty of future value. So it could involve negotiations like "Achieve X amount of committed revenue and Y technical milestones and give us a deal on pricing when we use the SAS network then we'll buy your shares at Z premium." This sort of arrangement can take months to negotiate. SAS announced in September that they were in strategic negotiations with global telco and sat companies. Which was six months ago - a good period for negotiating a complex partnership arrangement.
So, those are some reasonable scenarios for funding, all of which line up with a March announcement. That's why earlier may not be better. But we won't know for certain until we see what it is (knock on wood it happens, etc).
SAS Price at posting:
16.0¢ Sentiment: Hold Disclosure: Held
