Price Hike Causing No Waves, Iridium Says

Iridium's first price hike in its commercial voice service since 2018 hasn't hurt demand, CEO Matt Desch said Thursday as the company announced Q1 2023 earnings. He said this week's outage of Inmarsat's L-band service over East Asia and the Pacific on its I-4 F1 could benefit Iridium's competing maritime safety service since Iridium's low-earth orbit architecture means there wouldn't be an outage of any particular geographic region. Inmarsat's safety services were subsequently restored. Iridium said Q1 revenues were $205.3 million, up 22% year over year. It said it ended the quarter with 2.05 million billable subscribers, up 15% year over year, with commercial IoT driving that growth. Iridium stock closed Thursday at $65.03, up 10.9%.