VIA SATELLITE: Will you follow your acquisition of 5DTV with more moves to consolidate the occasional use market?
ANTONOVICH: We do see ourselves as a consolidator in this industry. The acquisition of 5DTV, Canada’s oldest and largest reseller, was very good for us and the company’s new Canadian customer set. We think everybody is happier after the transaction, as it brings scale and continuity to the marketplace. 5DTV was good but not growing. We offer a broader range of services and satellites in Canada. It was a fantastic acquisition, and we would love to find more like it.
We see opportunities for growth in other countries and regions. Our commitments for occasional use capacity are global. We enjoy very good rates across the global fleets we do business with, but we haven’t leveraged that to the degree I would like. We want to grow our presence in the international markets and expand the traditional market set from broadcast into the enterprise and government sectors, where we see natural growth for civilian and military requirements for short notice bandwidth. We’re built for it already. If we can handle commitments on five-minutes’ notice from broadcasters, we should be handle three-to-seven day commitments for government projects.
VIA SATELLITE: Do you plan to move into the government business?
ANTONOVICH: We have very good informal relationships with all three companies in the DSTS-G contract. There are no announced deals, but we try to source bandwidth for all of them. There are challenges, but we look for what we do in occasional use as a way of smoothing out the business for some of those opportunities out there. The challenge is that none of the traditional government suppliers have the scale of occasional use business to justify what the government might need for short notice/short term occasional-use type of bandwidth, but we do. So it’s just about creating a channel to support that kind of activity with the DSTS-G contractors and other providers. That’s where the conversations are now. It would be a natural extension of our business and a great help to theirs.
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