Advanced Television

ABS revenues fall 4%

January 23, 2025

By Chris Forrester

ABS, formerly known as Asia Broadcast Satellite, has a recently appointed new CEO Mark Rigolle (who was previously CFO at SES and CEO at O3b) and announced some valuable new contracts over the past year. However, the headline numbers for the year to September 30th 2024 showed a fall of 4 per cent under what the company described as “very competitive market conditions”.

Rigolle said: “ABS has delivered another strong set of numbers outperforming the broader GEO satellite market with revenues excluding customers serving the CIS market largely flat year over year. We have been laser-focused on developing our distribution into new markets in order to counter the headwinds the sector is facing from Starlink in particular. We remained highly cost-disciplined while growing our pipeline of sales opportunities and building partnerships in order to develop our orbital slot filings.”

“ABS has incredibly strong assets,” he continued. “Our team is second to none and in particular our technical department is one of the most efficient in the industry. Our satellites are healthy with many years of useful revenue life ahead. The quality of our Ka-band filings is superb and the focus of our longer term growth plans is to develop these filings in strategically-important, high-potential markets for both commercial and defense users.”

“Having joined last May I have come to appreciate the strengths of ABS and look forward to continuing the success we have been enjoying with our existing assets, while driving forward the building of the platform for future growth,” he added.

ABS key metrics:
• Revenues of $66.3 million, down 4 per cent YoY under competitive market conditions
• Adjusted EBITDA of $35.9 million at 54 per cent margin
• Free cashflow stable at $19.1 million
• Net debt of $31.6 million, following $15 million debt paydown since August 2022
• Net debt leverage of 0.9x at September 30th 2024

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