With the broadband satellite services market continuing to grow, C-Com Satellite Systems Inc. is content in letting its product do its talking rather than taking a more direct approach to boosting its market share.

This approach is the main reason the company is not only profitable, but debt free, company President and CEO Leslie Klein told Satellite News. But that approach also brings with it the company’s biggest challenge, namely getting knowledge of its iNetVu Mobile broadband satellite solution out to its target customers.

“I think the hardest part is to get our name out there and make [resellers and users] aware that the product exists,” Klein said. “The product is very reliable. The people who use it love it. The hardest part for us is to bring this to the forefront.”

A full-scale marketing campaign is an avenue that C-Com has avoided mainly because of the costs, Klein said. So the company proceeds with the word-of-mouth strategy that has succeeded in making the company profitable. But that approach has created a second challenge that comes hand in hand with the lack of name recognition: long sales cycles.

C-Com relies on its network of resellers to move the iNetVu product and those resellers tend to scrutinize the product for an extended length of time before committing to it. Klein said. The typical sales cycle begins when a reseller or interested party purchases an iNetVu product and tests it throughout a two- to three-month period, he said. Once they see how it operates, the reseller then moves to sell the product to its customers and as the reseller’s customers begin to adopt the product, then the reseller comes back to C-Com to buy more iNetVu units.

The upside to this drawn-out process is that word-of-mouth sales generally multiply at the back end, Klein said. Adoption by a police force in a particular region, for example, can lead to sales to other police forces, he said. “Once one police force gets going with it, others are not far behind. It is the same with fire and emergency.”

The success of C-Com’s marketing plan is starting to show up in the company’s sales figures. In its most recent quarter, which ended Feb. 28, C-Com reported revenue of 1.2 million Canadian dollars ($972,000), up 19 percent from the 2004 first quarter. The company posted a profit of 13,300 Canadian dollars ($10,800), rebounding from a loss of 78,500 ($63,600) in the same period a year ago.

A deal signed June 7 to integrate iNetVu units with terminals manufactured by EMS Satellite Networks should also help get the C-Com product more exposure.

“We are in a situation where we have seeded the world with these units,” Klein said. “We will have, by the end of the year, more than 1,000 units in the field, and we expect that from those we will have multiple orders, multiple customers and multiple dealers buying the product after having seen them operate in different segments of the market.”

A Global Opportunity

The most recent dealer to spring up for C-Com is Netcom Africa Ltd., a Nigerian-based provider of satellite and wireless communications infrastructure solutions to Western Africa. Netcom’s customer base includes Internet service providers, military, non-governmental organizations, oil and gas exploration companies, construction companies and emergency service organizations. Nigeria is the second country in Africa where C-Com has a presence, joining South Africa.

“Africa obviously is a very large target because of its size and its limited infrastructure,” Klein said. “But, surprisingly enough, Europe is a very, very hot market. We have hundreds of systems deployed with fire, emergency and police forces. We also have quite a number of systems in the Middle East. North America is a very large market for us, and in Australia, we have 30 systems in the field already.”

Bucking current industry trends, C-Com’s sales in the military market, which are growing, continue to play second fiddle to the commercial and civil markets for C-Com’s mobile broadband solution Klein said.

“The military side is growing, but it is still a very small segment of the market mainly because the product is not built to military specifications,” Klein said. He noted that the iNetVu Mobile solution “quite often is built well enough to withstand the rigors of field operations. In some countries, they are deployed in some sort of support role. They provide communications to troops in forward or backward location. It seems to be working well enough that we have quite a number deployed [for military use].”

–Gregory Twachtman (Leslie Klein, C-Com Satellite Systems, 613/745-4110, ext. 4950)