NSR’s HTS Satellite Constellations, A Critical Assessment, 3rd Edition report finds a US$ 68 Billion Revenue Potential for HTS Satellite Constellations over the next decade, with varying levels of business case viability. Opportunity exists for SpaceX, OneWeb, mPower, Amazon, and Telesat to build fundamentally sound constellation businesses via high throughput, low latency, ubiquitous coverage and end-to-end secure connectivity. Although competition from GEO and within NGSO is expected to be high, there is a large enough pie to divvy up enabled by new segments.
“While total CAPEX is estimated to be more than $22B, constellation players could generate a return on investment and replenish via differentiated plays across 18+ satcom revenue segments,” remarked Gagan Agrawal, report author and NSR Senior Analyst. “The advent of secure cloud enterprise and connected fleet use cases, and presence of price-demand elasticities to the tune of 40%-78%, will significantly help Non-GEO players close their business cases. NSR expects more GEO players start consolidating in 2021 and onwards to economically compete with Non-GEOs,” added Agrawal.
NSR finds different risk quotients impacting business models of each player depending on CAPEX, price elasticity, GEO competition, and organizational dependence. As these constellations launch between 2021 and 2024, all eyes will be on the performance of Broadband and Trunking applications, along with utilizing software to optimize network and price and avoid interference as each player tries to maximize revenue. Given the scale of these ventures, applications on the cloud take centre-stage with standardized service orchestration and inter-operability a must going forward within satcom networks.
