- Starlink missed on customer growth expectations. It's still making a ton of money for SpaceX.
- The company is leaning heavily on large customers, like governments.
- The company acquired a spectrum provider in October. Execs said they're targeting mobile providers.
Starlink is SpaceX's big cash cow. And it just reported some mixed results.
SpaceX said its satellite-internet service had 13.6 million consumer subscribers at the end of September, up 1.6 million from three months earlier. That fell short of the 14.2 million expected by Bloomberg analysts — though the company said the figure excludes hundreds of thousands of enterprise subscribers and aviation customers.
Still, Starlink is making a lot of money. Monthly consumer revenue per user rose 5% from the previous quarter, while enterprise and government revenue jumped 91% from a year earlier to $2.1 billion.
A big, important customer? Airlines. The company said that, as of the end of September, 3,800 total aircraft had been outfitted with Starlink equipment.
"Aviation remains a major growth opportunity, as we're still early in the installation phase with many of the largest carriers worldwide," CFO Bret Johnsen said on Tuesday's earnings call.
SpaceX's next venture: your phone
The company has recently focused on becoming a mobile provider.
On October 8, SpaceX announced it had agreed to buy a portfolio of low-band wireless spectrum from Grain Management. The deal gives SpaceX a key ingredient that could turn its Starlink satellite-internet provider into a direct challenger to Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile.
SpaceX said the spectrum would power Starlink Mobile, which it has described as a hybrid satellite-and-terrestrial network designed to work indoors, outdoors, and in cellular dead zones.
It also comes after SpaceX hinted that it saw itself as a challenger to mobile carriers during its first-ever earnings call in August. The company's president, Gwynne Shotwell, hinted that the company was considering building a "cellular base station on basically the gear that holds the Starlink broadband dish," rather than a ground-based system.
They said the market was worth $600 billion annually.
"I anticipate us to be able to acquire quite a few of their customers," Shotwell said.
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