EchoStar's Boost Sees Rare Subscriber Gains; Analysts Question its Future
EchoStar's Boost Wireless ended 2024 with a rarity -- subscriber gains -- but its pay-TV business and HughesNet subscriber numbers continued to fall, according to Q4 financial results announced Thursday. In a call with analysts, CEO Hamid Akhavan said he expects the Boost subscriber growth to continue in 2025.
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For Q4, revenue was $4 billion, down from $4.2 billion in Q4 2023, primarily due to fewer pay-TV and HughesNet subscribers, EchoStar said. It finished the quarter with 7 million Boost subscribers. Not counting effects from the end of the Affordable Connectivity Program, it would have added 105,000 in the quarter, it said. It closed out 2023 with 7.4 million wireless subscribers.
EchoStar said its 7.7 million pay-TV subscribers at year-end -- 5.7 million from Dish and 2 million from Sling -- were down from 8.5 million at the end of 2023 -- 6.5 million Dish and 2 million Sling. It had 883,000 broadband satellite subscribers at the end of 2024, compared with 1 million at 2023's end.
Q4 was an inflection point for Boost subscriber numbers, LightShed Management’s Walt Piecyk wrote on X. “Now the question is sustainability.”
MoffettNathanson wrote investors Thursday that liquidation of EchoStar spectrum “is the only realistic outcome here.” It has repeatedly said it sees an EchoStar bankruptcy as inevitable (see 2402120007). MoffettNathanson said Q4 marked only the second time in the past four years that EchoStar's mobile service added customers. MoffettNathanson said the FCC under Chairman Brendan Carr would be generally opposed to caps or limits on how much EchoStar spectrum any of the major wireless carriers could acquire, which could mean robust bidding. On the other hand, AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile are laboring with “overburdened balance sheets,” MoffettNathanson said.
Company President-Technology John Swieringa said that during Q4, EchoStar's buildout of its 5G network extended coverage to more than 80% of Americans -- 288 million people -- meeting its latest FCC milestone.
Pointing to the direct-to-device activity in the satellite and mobile industries, Akhavan said EchoStar has offered a satellite-enabled messaging service internationally since 2023 and plans to expand in the D2D space with broadband-level data capacity. He said that would entail partnering with a low earth orbit satellite organization but didn’t give details.
Akhavan said EchoStar "has just begun scratching the surface" of bundling. He said the Boost Mobile subscriber bump didn't come from bundling but from numerous operational changes the company has made this year, revamping everything from activations to billing.
EchoStar plans to participate in the FCC's forthcoming AWS-3 spectrum auction, he said, noting that the spectrum "is much more valuable today" than it was in the 2014 auction for AWS-3 licenses.
Asked about SpaceX Starlink competition, Hughes Chief Operating Officer Paul Gaske said its Jupiter 3 satellite service is largely focused on video delivery. He said that more broadly, EchoStar is looking at services that are differentiated from Starlink's.