Some great stuff in here - obviously lots of education for new-comers but also for holders!
Take us through the contracts that you have announced already. I think you’ve got one in Africa, where else?
Yeah, we signed a few contracts already in Africa. Well, let’s go back a little. In the early days – and I’m saying early but it was only a year ago – before the Three Diamonds were in space, we already had a lot of agreements. They were mostly non-binding. Those were what we call MOUs, memorandums of understanding, or letter of intent, LOI, which means that the customer is expressing his willingness to do business with you assuming that you would actually be able to demonstrate what you’re saying if you’re planning to do.
Once we have launched those three satellites and we have proven that the technology works, we have converted those pre-agreements, as you might call them, into actual contracts and I’ll give a few examples. One of them is with a large telecommunications provider in Africa, a company called Sat Space Africa that works in most of the African continent, in 27 countries, and they’re reselling our capabilities to their end customers. Another example is BeepTool, which is a small company from Nigeria that provides financial transactions over the phone.
By the way, almost 80% of the usage of mobile phones in Africa is not for calls, it’s for financial transactions, for text messages. BeepTool is a small provider of these financial transactions and we have signed a contract with them with a value of $30 million dollars guaranteed revenues for the company. Another example is a company based in Ghana called Universal Cyberlinks and they are working mostly with the government of Ghana, but with others as well, and they’re providing all kinds of satellite communication services in the agriculture field, in the education field and in other government sectors.
These are a few examples. We are in the process of moving forward with our South American customer called Global Sat Group and in other areas of the world as well which of course we’ll announce once things fruition into agreement.
How much will it cost to send 200 nanosatellites into orbit?
Believe it or not, it’s unbelievably low cost. A usual standard telecommunication satellite that is launched to a geo-stationary orbit, the ones that we use to watch TV with for example, is usually at the cost of a few hundred millions of dollars. We’re deploying a full constellation of 200 satellites is less than the cost of one large telecommunication satellite. It’s $150 million. That means that to manufacture, develop, launch and operate a single nanosatellite cost around $750,000 if you do the maths....
In fact, according to a recent presentation, you’re talking about multiple revenue streams, so not just mobile phone end users. You’re selling on instant messages, you’re going to sell to marine and shipping, aviation black-box tracking and so on. Talk a little about the other revenue streams that you’re looking at?
That’s one of the nicest things. What we’re building actually is the platform for communication or an infrastructure for communication. If you think about it, almost everything that you’re doing involves some way of transferring information from one place to another. Indeed, there are almost endless revenue streams. It can be from the sectors of agriculture, from education, from finance, from the transportation… You’ve mentioned the maritime services, indeed every container needs to transfer information from one place to another.
SAS Price at posting:
15.0¢ Sentiment: Hold Disclosure: Held
