‘No competition’ claims Avanti CEO
October 19, 2015
By Chris Forrester
Avanti Communications’ CEO David Williams, asked in a TV broadcast on October 15th what risks remained for his satellite broadband business, made a somewhat sweeping remark that Avanti had “relatively little competition” in its key target markets which are Africa, Europe and the Mid-East. He thus ignored the extremely fierce rivalry Avanti faces from Eutelsat, SES, Intelsat, Yahsat, Arabsat, Turksat, HellasSat, Telenor, O3b and others working hard over his target regions to win business.
Williams, of course, was on the show to promote Avanti but the broadcaster (Hargreaves Lansdown, an investment broker) might be concerned that investors could question the failure to mention Avanti’s tough competition. The broker firmly advises would-be investors to “please seek personal advice, as this site doesn’t provide personalised advice and isn’t based on your circumstances.”
“Our recurring revenues are growing at more than 50 percent per annum. If that continues then by 2021 our fleet will be full,” Williams added. “In the context of total demand in Africa, Europe, Middle East regions there’s relatively little competition.” He continued by saying that Avanti’s future was pretty much risk free, with the risk of launch failure at just 1 percent, and that the businesses future was now based on getting the final products to market, and the time it takes to get customers up and running, “so no first-order risks”.
He added that most of Avanti’s focus of late has been on sub-Saharan Africa (“90 per cent of investment”), the Middle East and Turkey. “Most of our growth will come from consumer broadband [in Africa] where we now have a very significant lead to market advantage.”