Telesat (TSAT) Q2 2026 earnings call transcript

Thank you, Jordan. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Earlier this morning, we filed our quarterly report for the period ending June 30, 2026 on Form 6K with the SEC and on CDAR+. Our remarks today may contain forward-looking statements. There are risks that Telesat's actual results may differ materially from the results contemplated by the forward-looking statements as a result of known and unknown risks and uncertainty.

For a discussion of known risks, please see Telesat's annual report and updates filed to the SEC. Telesat assumes no responsibility to update or revise these forward-looking statements. I would now like to turn the call over to Dan Goldberg, Telesat's President and Chief Executive Officer.

Okay, thanks, James, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. I'll start with a few words about the business, and then I'll hand the call over to Donald to speak to the numbers in more detail, and we'll then open the call up to questions. Just last week, we announced we signed the first contract in the ESCAPE program, and we're very pleased to have secured that key strategic opportunity to provide such a critical capability to the Canadian Armed Forces to support the range of important missions, and interests that they have and that Canada has in the Arctic.

With that contract announced and an expanded light speed constellation fully funded for an accelerated rollout, we're very well positioned to execute on the wide range of additional opportunities for light speed that we're now engaged on, including in the defense and government segments, allowing us to build on our already substantial $5.6 billion Telesat Lightspeed contractual backlog. Our strong confidence in our future prospects caused us to raise our publicly available revenue and EBITDA forecast for Lightspeed, which I hope you all saw last week. In addition to the strong commercial traction we're getting, we've also been making excellent progress on the technical and operations fronts for Lightspeed. On the constellation development side of things, we've signed a firm contract with MDA for 69 additional satellites, bringing the fully funded and committed constellation size to 225 satellites.

We've secured almost all the launch capacity we need and expect to sign an agreement for the final Falcon 9 rocket required to complete the deployment of the 225 satellite constellation in the near future. And we continue to expect global commercial availability in the first quarter of 2028. In light of the expansion of the constellation, you may have noticed in today's earnings release that we updated our 2026 Lightspeed Total Investment Guidance for 2026, which includes both OPEX and CAPEX associated with delivering the global network. Our prior guidance was $1 to $1.2 billion Canadian dollars of investment this year, which we've now brought up to $1.3 to $1.5 billion Canadian dollars, a $300 million increase to the bottom and top end of the range.

In our geo segment, first quarter results came in largely as we had expected, with most of the year-over-year decline coming from non-renewals and lower revenue renewals in our broadcast activities, and to a lesser extent in reductions in services for fixed broadband customers. That was partially offset by new contracts for broadband services for commercial airline broadband connectivity. As you may have noticed, our geo backlog increased during the quarter due primarily to a meaningful term extension of one of our broadcast video contracts, evidence of our continued efforts to maximize the value of our existing geo satellites, lock in long-term commitments where we can to improve cash flow visibility in the legacy business, all while retaining careful cost controls to mitigate the impact of ongoing revenue pressures in the geo segment.

During the quarter, two of our geo satellites, ANIC F4 and Telstar 14R, reached the end of their useful lives and were retired from service. While we've been able to transfer nearly half the traffic from these satellites on the certain of our remaining geo satellites, The decommissioning of these satellites will still be a headwind for the balance of this year and into the future. We had anticipated this impact. We knew that these satellites were going to be retired this year. We provided our geo-segment guidance for 2026, and we're reiterating that revenue and EBITDA guidance today.

Staying with our geo segment, we were pleased to see late last month the FCC's report and order to repurpose 160 megahertz of C-band satellite spectrum for terrestrial wireless use. Under the terms of the report and order, Telesat is due to receive $189 million U. S. dollars in incentive payments for our role in freeing up that valuable spectrum.

We're actively working to develop a plan to ensure that the spectrum is cleared prior to the transition deadlines in 2030 and 2031. We successfully cleared CBAN spectrum in the prior FCC CBAN reallocation proceeding, and we're confident we'll be successful this time as well.

Lastly, for Telesat Geo, we've entered into a new term loan agreement with a third-party lender for $120 million U. S. dollars to be used for general corporate purposes. These new funds will provide Telesat with greater financial resources to support our legacy business. We remain heavily focused on the upcoming Telesat geo-debt maturities and achieving a fair and balanced consensual outcome for all of our stakeholders.

So with that, I'll hand over to Donald. We'll speak to the numbers in more detail, and then we'll open the call up to questions.

Thank you, Dan, and good morning, everyone. My prepared remark today will focus on highlights from this morning, press release and filing. In the second quarter of 2026, we reported consolidated revenue of $79 million, adjusted EBDA of $22 million, and net loss of $559 million. Council's data net loss for the quarter was impacted by an increase of $475 million in the fair value of Telesat Lightspeed warrants and the weakening of Canadian dollars during the quarter, impacting the value of our U. S. dollar-denominated debt. The warrants are now valued at more than $1.3 billion, reflecting the expansion of the constellation to 225 satellites and our ability to accelerate the execution of our plan. Interest expense for the core totaled $50 million, down $54 million in the second quarter of 2025 due to a lower interest rate on our term loan.

Interest relating to the telesatellite speed totaling $18 million during the second quarter of 2026 was capitalized to the project compared to $8 million for the same period last year as the amount on standing on the Telesat Lightspeed financing has increased to $974 million at the end of the quarter, including capitalized interest of $54 million. Our geo segment results were in line with our expectations during Q2. We generated $78 million in revenue, down 26% or $28 million compared to the same period of last year. For the year, revenue of our geo business segment was $1.04 million, also down 26% from last year. The majority of the revenue declined during the quarter and for the year was in our broadcast segment, driven by the expiration of contract for service on our NIMIC-4 satellite in 2025, and lower capacity and rate as part of the renewal of contract on NIMIC-5.

In our enterprise segment, the decline was primarily driven by lower revenue from our Explorer contract renewed in October 2025. These declines were partially offset by new contracts added in 2025 in our aviation vertical by our global commercial team. The utilization of our satellite was 60% at the end of Q2. I'll note that this utilization figure benefit from the retirement of our Telstar 14-AR and and EF4 satellite during the quarter. If we adjust for these retirements, utilization declined about 2 percentage points from the end of G1.

The backlog of our geo segment rose to 900 million at the end of June, due in large part to the extension of one of our broadcast service contract for five years during the quarter.

Adjusted EBD for our geo segment was 43 million for the second quarter, down 37 million compared to last year, driven by lower revenue and higher expense related to our debt refinancing process. Our second quarter, 2026, results include approximately $14 million in costs related to our debt refinancing, up approximately $7 million compared to the same period last year. Adjusting for these expenses, our geo-adjusted EBDA would have been $57 million during the period, down 30% from last year. For the year, adjusted EBDE totaled $119 million after excluding expense relating to our refinancing process. As a result of this performance, for the first half of 2026, we are reiterating our geo-business segment guidance for the year of revenue of $300 to $320 million and adjusted EBDE of $210 to $230 million, excluding debt refinancing and related litigation expenditure.

Turning to the cash and liquidity position of our geo business segment, cash at the end of Q2 was approximately $160 million, and we announced today we borrowed U. S. $120 million under a new term loan, providing meaningful additional cash for Telesat Geo. We invested $165 million in the Telesat Lightspeed program during the second quarter of 2026, including $145 million in capital expenditure and $20 million in non-capitalized labor and other operating costs for a total investment of $336 million this year.

Given the accelerated expansion of the Constellation deployment from 156 to 225 satellites, we announced last week we now expect full-year investment in the program to be between $1.3 to $1.5 billion, up from 1 to 1.2 billion guidance we provide earlier this year. With the incremental investment funded by pre-service milestone payment to be received from the Government of Canada.

In the LEO segment, we ended the quarter with over 200 million in cash on hand. This cash combined with 1.6 billion in availability under our Telesat Light Speed Financing, U. S. $325 million from our vendor financing, and U. S. $1.5 billion in milestone payment related to the ESCAPE contract is expected to fully fund the Telesat Lightspeed project, including U. S. $500 million of contingencies, until it achieved global commercial service around the end of Q1 of 2028. Our backlog for Lightspeed increased significantly to approximately $5.6 billion, with the increase coming largely from the 15-year initial escape contract we announced last week. We also signed a five contract with Northwest Dell in early Q2 for rural broadband connectivity in Canada Before I conclude my prepared remark I would like to confirm that we are in compliance with all companies in our credit agreements and indenture I now turn the call back to the operator for the Q&A.

Thank you.

Hey Caleb, good morning and thanks for the question. So maybe just a quick step back on Escape, and we've talked a little bit about this before, it's all about Arctic satellite communications capability. There's a military K-band component of that. And as we've announced before, that's going to be provided using Lightspeed, and we've expanded the constellation to meet those requirements. So that's number one. Number two is there'll be also a UHF and X-band capability. That is expected to be in MEO. That is a constellation that will be primed by MDA and Telesat will be a subcontractor to MDA. And so there's still more work that needs to be done on that, more work with the government of Canada, D&D, the Canadian Air Force to define exactly what that capability is going to look like and contracts need to be in place.

We've got a teaming agreement with MDA on that. Tell us that and MDA have been, you know, already, and we announced this a while ago, named as kind of the strategic partners for that capability. It's not my expectation that we're going to end up owning that MEO constellation. Would we have some ability to resell excess capacity on it? I don't know. That's not something that we've explored at this point in time. And it's going to take a little while from here. We've got to do definition work and whatnot. I think at a minimum, what Telesat will be doing in connection with the MEO constellation, again, as a subcontractor to MDA, is providing network integration expertise, ground segment expertise.

overall escape integration. You've got the MILK-A, you've got the UHF, you've got the X-Band that's all got to, you know, operate as an integrated network. So in any event, I do think it's a meaningful opportunity for Telesat. When we talked about the escape contract that we announced just last week, we're pretty clear that that's an initial contract. We expect follow-on contracts probably next year for even still the military K-A-Ban. It'll be more about network integration, user terminals, another ground segment. And that, you know, we expect to be a meaningful set of contracts for us. And then on Mio, that work's going to take, you know, probably a couple of years to get in place. But here again, you know, our expectation is we'll have a long-term role in supporting that constellation and that there, you know, and that that represents a very material revenue opportunity for the company.

So I hope that's helpful.

Yeah. So, you know, when we talk about space relay, that's really about leveraging the Lightspeed Constellation to communicate with other satellites. Those could be satellites, you know, Earth observation, for instance, and we have the ability to connect those satellites into our global backbone. So many of those satellites today, they're taking images, they're collecting data, but the user, the end user, has to wait for the satellite to pass over a gateway that that data gets downloaded, and only then is it available to the end user.

We can get that data back to the users in real time. If that satellite is connected to the Lightspeed constellation, it can collect the data, it can instantly relay that data to Lightspeed, and we can terminate that traffic anywhere on the face of the Earth, you know, in milliseconds. And so we think that's very powerful. We're already doing work with NASA to demonstrate this capability, and we've disclosed that NASA contract before, and we've been engaged with quite a few potential customers for this, Earth observation companies, other governments. You know, governments have a lot of those satellites in orbit collecting valuable data with, you know, and they want access to that information as fast as possible.

So when, you know, oh, and I should also say that our optical intersatellite links meet the U. S. government's SDA standard. And so that opens up, you know, we think a big opportunity because other operators will have their optical links also meeting those standards, which means we can pass traffic to one another. So, you know, and you've seen our forecast that revenue, you know, ramps. I don't have it in front of me. It sort of ramps gradually.

But we're bullish on that opportunity for defense applications, for civil applications. We think, you know, we think there's great promise there. And certainly when you hear others talk about data centers in space, you know, that's another opportunity. If there are data centers in space, you've got to get, you know, that it needs to be connected back to the Earth. And so when we think about space relay, it covers a pretty wide range of applications that we're quite bullish on.

So I'd say this on D2D, and maybe the first thing I'd say is, you know, we're very, very focused right now on executing on light speed. It's the biggest project in Telesat's history. It's the biggest project, space project in Canada's history. And, you know, we see a huge opportunity there, but we need to stay focused on executing that, and we are.

But that said, we're, you know, pretty well acquainted with what, you know, the various operators around the world and here in Canada are doing around D2D. We've had conversations with a number of parties about, you know, what role Telesat could potentially play in a D2D constellation. And so, anyway, I won't offer any more specifics than that other than to say it's not in any sense our principal area of focus. But opportunistically, if we can, you know, play a role in a D2D network where we can add value, that can be accretive to tell us that. It doesn't distract us from, you know, our top priorities. Yeah, you know, that's something that we would think about.

I wanted to also ask you, just going back to Lightspeed, obviously you put out those numbers, which were very positive. Can you maybe talk about the underlying assumptions a bit more outside of the big change in mix to government and military? Did you have a lot of movement in terms of the pricing assumptions, the price per bit, kind of, yeah, can you maybe kind of double-click on just some of the underlying assumptions that went into those forecasts that may have changed versus, you know, three years ago?

Yeah, I would say fundamentally there's certainly been, as you noted, a meaningful change in mix. When we first started down the path of Lightspeed, the world, you know, was a pretty different place than it is today. and these geopolitical shifts and some of these conflicts that are ongoing around the world have opened up this, you know, very significant opportunity for defense and kind of sovereign requirements to respond to that and to respond to what the government of Canada was needing for their escape program. We changed our frequency plan to add the military K-A band. And so in any event, so, you know, that in and of itself has a big impact on, you know, our expectations around revenue mix, because obviously the MILK-A is going to be used for those government defense and sovereignty applications.

Beyond that, though, yeah, we updated all the assumptions, obviously, underpinning the plan with respect to pricing, with respect to take up, with respect to geographic distribution and whatnot. But there were not, I would say, wholesale changes in terms of our expectations around the pricing environment. We know that the market for satellite-delivered broadband connectivity is going to be a competitive market. We always knew that. We've modeled, you know, downward price pressure over time throughout the plan. We did that previously. You know, that's still embedded in our current plan. We sort of sharpened our pricing assumptions in some instances down, in some instances up, based on, you know, kind of the more current information that we have.

So anyway, Edson, that's how we went about doing it. And, yeah, I hope that was helpful.

But what I can say is it remains a key priority. It always has been throughout the year. Our focus working with our advisors is to reach a consensual outcome with the legacy lenders prior to the maturities coming due. That's something that we're very focused on and doing it in a way that's fair and balanced for all the stakeholders of the business, including obviously the lenders.

So so that's what our focus has been. Our focus remains that we, you know, just given the nature of these kinds of processes, there's only so much that that we can say about it. And obviously, as soon as we have a material update that we can share, we will. But that's kind of the status at this point.

Thanks for the questions, Dave. So on, you know, trying to extrapolate, you know, the value of light speed from the warrant value, we're not going to do that for folks. But you're absolutely right, though. You know, the value of the warrants has gone up, you know, by more than 50 percent. And that's totally a function of the fact that we got the escape contract done. We've got this, you know, very significant backlog now on light speed. We've been able to accelerate, you know, our expectations around revenue and EBITDA, take up commensurate with us accelerating the expansion of the Constellation.

And so anyway, I mean, that's obviously a positive sign for the business. It's good news if you're a Canadian taxpayer because of the government of Canada and the government of Quebec have warrants in the Lightspeed project. So anyway, and I'm no sophisticated financial analyst. You are. You can probably, you know, working backwards, you know, make your own calculations about what that might imply for the value of light speed. But we're not going to do it for you. So that was one. And then on your question about further defense opportunities and when we'd be in a position to announce them, it's always tricky. You know, I mean, escape itself, you know, we laugh about this a little bit.

You know, we bid on that originally in 2008. We always knew it was a question of when and not a question of if. If someone had told me in 2008 it would take 18 years, I would have been surprised. But I don't expect the opportunities that we have in the pipeline for Lightspeed to take 18 years, because given the nature of the world right now, the customers that we're talking to, They want this capability as soon as possible.

And so we are having real, meaningful, concrete opportunities with, I'd say, you know, sovereign customers about using Lightspeed. It's always hard to handicap just how long those things will take. My expectation is by the end of next year, our backlog will be meaningfully higher because of my confidence, our confidence about converting things that we have in the pipeline today into firm, you know, take or pay contracts like like like escape. You know, is it possible to get something more done by the end of this year, recognizing that, you know, we're already halfway through August? I don't know. Maybe. I wouldn't foreclose it, but I sure wouldn't, you know, telegraph that we've got high conviction about doing that.

But we do have a higher conviction about getting that done between now, again, and the end of next year before, you know, Lightspeed even goes into full commercial service. So that's our expectation. But I got to say, you know, we never gave backlog guidance for this year. I think at most I would have said we expect, you know, backlog to be some multiples higher at the end of this year than it was, you know, at the beginning of this year. And there, you know, we're very pleased sitting here today, having gotten Escape. We signed the Northwest Telecontract. We have very positive, significant opportunities still in the pipeline above and beyond the incremental, meaningful opportunities with Escape.

So we are very bullish about our ability to meaningfully grow backlog from here even before we enter commercial service.

So I'd say this. Like, we're not going to get into the weeds of it on this call. But I will say at the highest level under our covenant package in the, and I'm just talking about in the legacy borrowing, so the term loan and the notes that we have out there, we obviously had scope to raise this incremental funding. And so we were pleased to get it done. It just gives us more financial resources to support the legacy business, which here again, I think is a good thing for the business. And I will say this also, we've provided some disclosure about this loan in the release and in the financial statements.

And in the fullness of time, we'll file the loan agreement as well. And so that'll be out there.

No, thanks for the question. No, they're identical to the first 156. And so, and, you know, what's good about that is they're going to, you know, just follow immediately down the assembly line from the 156. So it means that nothing about adding those 69 additional satellites is going to slow down in any way the delivery of those first 156, which is why we're standing behind our target entry date in terms of when we go into global service. And then those next 69 just follow right on from the initial 156. So, yeah, all 225 will be identical.

Yeah, no, it's a great question. And there are a couple of reasons. So one, when we, you know, converted the frequency plan for the first 156, absolutely the right thing to do, given all the opportunities we see with defense users and how much demand we expect there will be for this, you know, very advanced military K-band capability. So we're excited about that. But at the same time, we took 25 percent of the frequencies that were going to be available for our commercial customers sort of off the market. And we see huge opportunities there, and we didn't want to reduce our capacity that could support those commercial verticals like broadband connectivity for the airline industry, broadband connectivity for the maritime sector, broadband connectivity for rural broadband, enterprise users around the world and the like.

And so what was great about accelerating the expansion of the satellites, because our plans were always to have more satellites than 156. We were just going to fund the expansion satellites with the cash flow from the first 156. So it wasn't a view that we won't see demand for that capacity. We just didn't have enough money to grow the constellation as much as we wanted to. And so with this deal with ESCAPE, we're able to restore the 25% of commercial capacity that we had diverted for the defense market, number one. Two, accelerate the satellites that we always knew the market would need. And then I'd say lastly, just having more satellites in the constellation means more resiliency, more redundancy, better performance of the network.

So it was just a big win-win-win.

So to launch the 225 satellites we estimate we need 15 rockets We already have 14 under contract with SpaceX We had you know sort of three for lack of a better term surplus rockets that we didn need for the 156 But when we added the 69, we needed those three. So those got kind of brought forward. And then we needed one more. And so that and one more, you know, Falcon 9. And we like using Falcon 9. Super reliable.

They obviously SpaceX launches at a very rapid cadence. We're very focused on getting the Constellation deployed as quickly as possible. So that's the right launch vehicle for light speed. And so we needed one more rocket. So we've been in touch with our friends at SpaceX. They've agreed to make that rocket available to us. We're getting the launch services agreement in place to do that. But I'd also note it's our expectation that all of our launches for all 225 satellites will get done by the end of 2028. So that's the plan.

So these first 225, we're done. And by done, I mean the design's done. The hardware's been, you know, ordered. and satellites are already, you know, at MDA's new factory. Like, we're going hard down the path. We've got – and these are great satellites. I mean, it's – and with the right frequency plan with the military cave-in, we feel really good about that. So we don't have any scope at this point in time without taking some massive delay, which we will not do to make modifications to these 225. So the ship has sailed on those for future satellites, and our expectation is absolutely the light speed constellation is going to grow over time. That will be a response to demand that we're seeing out there in the market, but we're very bullish on that.

We're already doing a fair amount of work around here as to what our next generation of light speed satellites will look like. Could those accommodate other frequency bands, hosted payloads? Absolutely, but not these first 225.

Okay, thanks, James. The filing, I'm not sure what you're referencing in terms of drawing a conclusion that we're entertaining a bankruptcy filing. That's not the case at all. Our focus is strongly on refinancing the debt prior to the maturities, achieving a consensual outcome. That's the focus. We're spending a lot of time and a lot of energy to achieve that outcome, number one. And then on the $120 million, where it fits in, here again, like on this call this morning, the plan is not to go into the weeds on that. As I said, we'll share more information about that. You know, we've said that the borrowings were made, you know, within a non-guarantor subsidiary of Telesat Geo.

So, you know, we're over there in the legacy, you know, debt silo. And as I said, also, the loan agreement will get filed and made available. And so for now, we'll leave it at that.

Yeah, so there we – you're right, I won't say. But I will note that obviously having that FCC order come out and tell us that being eligible for those proceeds subject to our meeting our obligations to clear that spectrum on time, that's obviously a very accretive development for the business.

Thank you.

Yeah, Chris, thanks. We're making really good progress on rolling out the ground segment. So we're talking about landing stations here. So, you know, we have, I'm looking at my technical colleague, at least three or four landing stations already under development here in Canada. And we've been, you know, installing, you know, the big gateway antennas, doing testing. That's going well. We've announced that we've got some ground stations being built for us in Australia. We did the deal with Orange in France at their Bersenet Teleport. So that is being, what's the word I'm looking for? Commissioned.

Thank you, Michelle.

Commissioned right now. So we're making really good progress there. We've been doing testing on the antennas, and we gave Intellion a big contract to build the landing station antennas. And so we've been commissioning those and doing the testing. So that's all going very positively. As to working with third parties to support the landing stations, yeah, I would say absolutely that's something that we're receptive to. And it's something that we've always done. You know, even our geostationary, the ground stations around the world that support our geo satellites, some of those we own, including some in Canada, one in the U. S. , But many of them, you know, were relying on third-party teleports to provide the service with light speed.

And by the way, this isn't unique to Telesat. It's what everyone does, including Amazon, Starlink, OneWeb, I believe. Certainly, you know, SES, we all make use of third-party teleports. We might own some of the equipment that sits at those third-party teleports, so they kind of host that equipment for us and provide us a service. And we're not thinking about it any differently with respect to Lightspeed. And there's some real benefits if we work with third-party providers. We don't need to own teleports all over the world. That wouldn't be a good use, I think, of our capital or our time. And so we've already are working with some third parties in Australia, Europe, I mentioned. We're having some conversations with folks in Asia because we need landing stations there, too.

And we're receptive to doing something, I'd say, kind of broader, more comprehensive with one or more third parties. If that's something that would accelerate our rollout, if that were financially accretive, always, of course, provided that they can provide the mission-critical services we need and do it in a secure environment, given the nature of the traffic that we'll be supporting on Lightspeed.

Well, we're I mean, we're rolling out landing stations. We have to support the our our upcoming launches. And so, you know, we're we've got at least, you know, eight plus tele teleports landing stations under development various stages right now. Some of them are already done. Some of them are in flight. We'll be doing more even over the course of this year. And so, yeah, you know, we expect to be able to share more information about our plans for that.

Thank you.

Okay. Well, operator, thank you very much. Maybe I'd just say in sum, I mean, we're about two-thirds of the way through the year. And we feel very good about how the business is performing, how we're executing, where we reiterated our guidance for GEO. Last week, we announced the largest contract in Telesat's history with the ESCAPE contract. The pipeline for Lightspeed is very, very significant. We have $5.6 billion of backlog at this point. in time with Lightspeed and between the further opportunities with ESCAPE, the other sovereign opportunities that we have and commercial opportunities that we have in the pipeline, we are, I'd say, more bullish than ever about our prospects. The constellation has expanded. It's accelerated.

It's fully funded. We have half a billion dollars, U. S. dollars, in contingency on support light speed, which we're very focused on not needing to dip into. The geo business actually is performing pretty well year to date. We actually grew our backlog in geo this past quarter, which we haven't done for a while. I think that shows some of the resiliency around that business and improve cash flow visibility when we're able to grow it. Certainly the announcement by the FCC recently on the CBAN process and Teloset being eligible for $189 million U. S. dollars of proceeds. On the back of the $344 million in proceeds that we received from the earlier proceeding, which gives us confidence that we'll secure this $189,000.

I think we end Q2 and head into the rest of the year really optimistic and bullish about where the business is going and our prospects. So in any event, thank you all for joining us this morning, and we look forward to chatting with you when we issue our third quarter numbers. So thank you, operator.