Global Eagle reports $223m loss
February 7, 2018
By Chris Forrester
In-flight entertainment and broadband provider Global Eagle Entertainment (GEE) has apologised for a 9-month delay in filing quarterly reports to the USA’s Securities and Exchange Commission, and the NASDAQ stock exchange, saying that it had suffered difficulties in absorbing some of its recent acquisitions, notably EMC (for $550 million) in May 2016.
The company also lost its CEO and CFO during the year.
The good news was that sales revenues grew 23 per cent during the first 9-months of last year over 2016, at $460 million. The bad news was that its net loss was $223 million, a significant 10-times its losses of $21.1 million in 2016.
CFO Paul Rainey explained the “significant” one off charges incurred in 2017, and these included the purchase of an old inclined orbit satellite (AMC-3) bought from SES for $29 million and which had now been renamed Eagle-1.
GEE now has secured capacity on a range of 56 satellites, doubling the bandwidth available for clients and users and including a tripling of capacity on SES-15 launched in May last year.