Anpanman - SpaceMobile's Royal Flush: Bluebirds Ship and the T-Mobile Pivot

[00:00:07] Speaker A: This is the AST SpaceMobile Podcast. It will just basically come to your phone and be seamless regardless of where you are. We don't want the user even to know that it's connected by satellite. Listen, the opportunity that we have is very, very, very large.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: Good morning everyone! What an amazing week we have ahead of us. I just wanted to do a space. Yeah, I just tweeted, which is how I feel right now, there's nothing better than when you flop the nut royal straight flush and your opponent is holding 7-2 offsuit, which I feel like that That kind of sums up the week ahead that we have for AST SpaceMobile. So thanks everyone for joining. I wanted to cover a few things about AST and then I'm going to close out with T1 Energy. We had a bit of surprising news this morning. And so we'll cover that as well, but let's get down to it. So this morning, Abel Avalon, who is in New York City, and you can draw any conclusions you want from that, but he's here in New York City. He did an interview with CNBC with Morgan Brennan, who is a great reporter who covers the space industry. And yeah, he basically disclosed that the Bluebird satellites, the first batch has been shipped. I know there's some bears arguing whether it has been shipped or it is shipping. I can confirm with 100% certainty that the Bluebirds were shipped over the weekend. And that's based off of highly diligent and wonderful Space Mob investigation. So the satellites are shipped. It's not going to be shipped, will be shipped. They have been shipped. And so for the detractors out there, yeah, you're doing this kind of as a hobby, whereas we have people that are on the ground. that are solely focused on, um, yeah, due diligence around AST. So, uh, you're wrong, the birds have been shipped. And so I'd expect that the company is going to PR, um, this event, either potentially that, um, you know, the birds have been shipped, or maybe they'll PR later that they've arrived. Um, it's really up to them, right? And so, um, but what I think is important, uh, as part of— and I'll go through that interview, but, um, There's a few interesting pieces of the mosaic here. So Abel is in New York City. We have JP Morgan, the investor conference where AT&T CEO and Chairman John Stankey's going to be giving the keynote tomorrow. I'm pretty certain he's going to be speaking about this new joint venture between AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. And so that's going to be very interesting because all these things line up, right? Like I mentioned before, Abel never does. I mean, he's done maybe a handful that I can remember, but he rarely appears in public and speaks about the company. But yet this morning he went out of his way, which again, he's not in Midland, he's in New York City. And oftentimes when you're in New York City, you, for an executive like Abel, it's not, you know, if he's going to go meet with investors, that's typically Scott's job. Like, send Scott, and I've met up with Scott a few times here when he's in New York for investor conferences, but Abel's here. And so when you send the CEO to New York City and there's a conference that's going on where other CEOs are going to be there, that's usually because you're meeting and you might be meeting, might be an important meeting, or it might be something to the point of where you're signing something, right? And so that's some of the speculation. this morning. I do have confirmation that Abell, sorry, that AST SpaceMobile pulled out of the B-Rally conference, which is actually on the West Coast. And that was scheduled for, I think, May 20th and 21st. And so they're not attending. They pulled out of all their one-on-one meetings. And so yeah, something must be happening in New York City. What it is, I'm not sure, but What I will say as a hedge fund investor for many years, when companies pull out of conferences, sometimes very rarely, it could be for M&A, meaning like the company is about to announce a big deal. They might sell themselves out or they might— oh, someone's saying that the PR is out.
[00:04:46] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:04:46] Speaker B: Or they might sell themselves or they might be buying someone. The other news could be something corporate related. Um, okay, here we go. The Bluebird convoy is officially underway. 2 Bluebirds are already making their way to Cape Canaveral, with a 3rd close behind. Next stop, launch pad. Built in Texas, broadband from space designed to connect directly to everyday phones. Oh, there's a video here, uh, and I can't watch it because I'm talking to you guys, but, um, there it is. So what we knew, uh, Space Mob over the weekend is now publicly disclosed. They've shipped 2 Bluebirds on the way to Florida. That happened yesterday. And a 3rd one is following up shortly after. So going back to, and if you want to hop off, I'm recording this so you can listen to it afterwards, but I'm going to cover some important stuff. So in the CNBC interview, Abel talked about, and this is very important nuance, he talked about how supportive they were of the AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile joint venture. And he specifically said this joint venture will give them access to every operator in the US. And so I don't, on the one hand, and I've talked about this before, and I think Kooch covered this last night, from a regulatory standpoint, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, they're not going to explicitly say like, oh, AST is enabling this service. But because, you know, they want to get through regulatory review and not show, you know, not Kind of hint at anything at them being anti-competitive or any of that stuff, right? But here you have, um, Abel saying they are going to have access to every operator in the US. And so we know that they have exclusivity with AT&T for 3 years. They, they have exclusivity with Verizon for 2 to 3 years, I think, uh, or AT&T might be 4 years. And then T-Mobile, um, if you say every operator in the US, that means that T-Mobile is coming on board. I mean, there's no like parsing words there or whatever it is, right? And I will say in my conversations with management, it sounds like without saying directly, like T-Mobile is on board. And so we've got access to the top, the entire US market. Right. And on top of that, the other thing I would say is that, yeah, we've got access to all 3. My guess is that the joint venture is going to be structured something like satellite connect in Europe. And it's important to note that from what I understand, I think this whole joint venture, this idea was John Stankey's idea. And so if you look at the CEOs of Verizon and T-Mobile, they're CEOs of the companies, but they're not chairs of the board, whereas John Stankey, this is his vision. He's running the show, right? And so it was his idea to bring in T-Mobile. I think the wireless carriers also understand the competitive threats that potentially Starlink might be gunning for them, which clearly, if you're going to buy 60 megahertz of spectrum, the next move is to potentially try to pursue lower band spectrum, which there's none available right now, but there are some floating pieces here and there. And so clearly these carriers see Starlink as they should have, and many have known for a while, except for Mike Sievert, the former CEO of T-Mobile, Starlink is a big competitive threat, right? And so from a regulatory standpoint, as I've mentioned before, because Starlink operates as a separate network versus AST, which is fully embedded in the MNO core, the cool thing is that from a regulatory standpoint, Starlink's still going to be able to compete. They can just provide you an eSIM and they can sell you service separately. But that's a very tough hill to climb, right? And as Abel mentioned this morning, AST is the only company that provides broadband cellular connectivity to unmodified phones. On top of that, it's the only one that can utilize low-band spectrum. So all these new services that are coming out, they're all focused on MSS or mid-band spectrum, which is great for capacity, but when it comes to coverage and propagation, AST is the only company that can do that. And we haven't, until we're told otherwise, until we see different technology, for example, Starlink's V2 satellite, that's going to be focused on MSS, which is going to, you know, going to focus on EchoStar spectrum, but nobody is working at low-band spectrum. And the reason why that is, is you need to partner with the MNOs in order to do that, and no one else is doing it. On top of that, what was interesting in the interview today is that Abel talked about how through their partners, the company has access to 100 MHz of spectrum. And so that includes, of course, low-band spectrum, and then Mid-band spectrum. So on the low-band side, I think globally he's talking about, yeah, 100 MHz. I mean, they can, in terms of tunable spectrum, they can access 1,100 MHz of spectrum in low and mid-band. But the fact that he's pointing to a very specific number of 100 MHz, that tells me that they've figured out, at least with the key partners, which low-band spectrum they're going to work with. And so that was a big— a big point of disclosure. And it's a big competitive differentiation, right? So we have access to low-band spectrum, all these new emerging services, no one else can do it. The other thing is that Abel talked about, and this was confirmed when I talked to the management, I guess it was like a few weeks ago, this idea of launching every 1 to 2 months, that's out the window. That was a really, that average number was supposed to be over the entire year, but obviously since our Our timeframe got compressed because of manufacturing delays. The bell this morning confirmed that launches will now be every month. And so we've got a launch coming up in June. There's going to be either 1 or 2 in July, and then of course August, September, October, November, and December. And so that's why the company is still focused on getting 45 satellites in orbit. And remember, that includes 6 that are already up there right now. So call it another 39. But that's the target, right? And so if they hit 45 by the end of the year, or if it's January or February, it's kind of, it kind of doesn't, at this point, it kind of doesn't matter. I mean, it does matter in terms of execution and we obviously want to get to the bigger revenue potential faster. But this, going back to this joint venture between AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, because T-Mobile is walking from Starlink, And they're going to do that in a very subtle way. They're not going to say, Starlink, you're fired. They're going to say, oh, hey, Starlink, I guess we'll still offer your service. It could be, and this is how you get around antitrust issues. It could be on a menu of options for users. It's like, hey, if you want Starlink's sporadic texting and narrowband service, you can pick it, or you can do the new improved T-satellite service through AST SpaceMobile, and you pay, I don't know, $15 and you get full broadband. And so they'll offer it, they'll offer it to their users. And quite candidly, it might be a situation where eventually, well, once exclusivity ends for AT&T and Verizon, maybe they'll offer it just to appease regulators. But if I'm a user, I'm going to pick broadband over texting. And that's before people, I was speaking to Katzi over the weekend and we were talking about how Starlink is going to have a really tough climb in Europe because from a political perspective, I mean, it's pretty clear Elon's not very popular there just given how anti-Europe he is. So that's going to be a tough one for them. And I talked about this over the weekend, but I think probably over the next month or two, you're probably going to see Deutsche Telekom join Satellite Connect Europe, right? And so The head of Satellite Connect Europe, which is the JV between Vodafone and ASD Space Mobile, kind of alluded to additional MNOs joining. The fact that T-Mobile is now moving over to this and we have the CEO, obviously T-Mobile is controlled by Deutsche Telekom, and the CEO of Deutsche Telekom saying that he doesn't trust Starlink or Elon, that pretty, and then he said, we're open to using other satellite providers if they can provide service in Europe, you know, a superior broadband service in Europe, that's AST. And so I think we'll probably end up signing them in the next month or 2 is my guess, or I guess it could take longer. But what, yeah, I mean, it's kind of funny because I think the market is still kind of focused on launch and the delays, but no one's really pricing in the fact that we We've got 100% of the US market and we're about to get 100% of the European market. And with that 100% of the European market, if Deutsche Telekom goes to bat for you with Vodafone and Orange and Telefonica to the EU regulators, that 2027 May MSS 2 GHz spectrum allocation that's coming up for renewal, we're going to get a piece of that. We're going to get 10 by 10 MHz. Like that's, I think pretty much at this point, that's fait accompli, right? Like if all the top MNOs in Europe go to the regulators and say, we're using this service, give them spectrum, that's going to be very difficult to say no. And so I think that's why I'm so excited this week because we just got our Bluebird shipped. I'm going to go down to launch in June to watch the Falcon 9 take that batch up. But this week, tomorrow, again, we've got AT&T CEO is going to be giving a keynote, and he's probably going to disclose a bit more about the shorting venture. Um, but before you listen to that, just make sure that you've got a— you're going to hear that in the lens of a view towards regulators and antitrust. And so he's not going to be like super aggressive. He's going to talk about like, um, the American consumer and opening up competition and all that stuff, right? Um, but between the lines, like We really know what's going on. But yeah, so you have that. We had Abel go on CNBC this morning, which he never does, and he's in New York doing something, and they pulled out of the B Rally conference. And so I think we've got a pretty interesting week ahead. The other thing someone shared, I think it was like Spectator, is that Meredith Sharples, who's a managing director and head of Satellite Connect Europe, They're speaking at ITW 2026, which is in Maryland, and that is tomorrow at 3:15. And so could there be some announcements out of that? Who knows, right? But yeah, I just feel like we have a ton of momentum behind us right now. And so yeah, very positive morning. Let me just see if anyone has any other comments here, but And I need to watch this video because it shows people signing the satellites, which is pretty cool. But yeah, so I think the setup this week, you know, I think we, I guess when we hit the bottom of $63, was that 2 weeks ago? You know, there were all these catalysts that were coming up and it was probably, I mean, obviously it was difficult for people to see beyond what the stock price was doing then, but We're now, as some people have pointed out, like we're at this point of this AST seasonality where May, from January to May, obviously we hit an all-time high in January, but since then we've consolidated in this area. But for the next few months and through the end of the year, like we're being, the setup is unbelievable, right? And so this, I tweeted like endless rally, I think it was the day after we hit 63. I honestly believe in that. And I think in the coming weeks we're going to breach our all-time high, which was intraday, I think it was like $129 or so. We're going to blow past that. That's my opinion. So yeah, strap in, hold on to your butts. I think the next few days and weeks are going to be tremendous. And as I said before, you know, I'm going to see you guys down over in Cape Canaveral when we go up in mid-June. Um, so if you're listening for AST, now you can like hop off.
[00:17:12] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to the AST Space Rover Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others, post about it on social media, or leave a rating and review. To catch all the latest news about AST SpaceMobile, make sure to subscribe. Thanks again, and I'll see you next time. We're doing something very, very big, and I think with this technology we can really affect a billion lives. AST SpaceMobile is the only company that has proven technology to deliver cellular broadband connectivity directly from space to the everyday smartphone. People just basically turn on their phone and be seamless regardless of where you are. We don't want the user even to know that it's connected by satellite. Our role is to bring this into reality, always in partnership with the end users. Listen. Mmm, waffles.