Company: IRDM
Filing Date: 2025-02-13
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001628280-25-005302
Chunk: 12

Company: Iridium Communications Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-02-13
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 12
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 stations, airline tracking and flight management applications and crew e-mail applications for the maritime industry. We believe that working with VADs allows us to create new platforms for our products and services and increases our market opportunity while reducing our overall research and development, marketing, and support expenses. Our VADs include AeroAntenna Technology, Inc., AnsuR Technologies AS, ASIQ Pty Ltd. Crib Gogh Ltd, Ocean and Coastal Environment Sensing Inc., Rockwell Collins Inc. and two10degrees Limited.

We use a wholesale rate structure for our commercial products and services. Under our distribution agreements, we charge our distributors wholesale rates for commercial products and services, subject to discount and promotional arrangements and geographic pricing. We also charge fixed monthly access fees per subscriber for some of our services. Our distributors are in turn responsible for setting their own pricing to end users. Our agreements with distributors typically have terms of one year and are automatically renewable for additional one-year terms, subject to termination rights. We believe this business model reduces back-office complexities and costs and allows distributors to remain focused on revenue generation, while also providing incentives for distributors to focus on selling our commercial product and service portfolio and developing additional applications.

7

Government Markets

We provide mission-critical mobile satellite products and services to all military branches of the DoD as well as to other U.S. government departments and agencies. These users require voice and two-way data capability with global coverage, low latency, mobility and security and often operate in areas where no other terrestrial or wireless means of communications are available. We believe we are well positioned to satisfy demand from these users. Our 9575A handset is the only commercial, mobile handheld satellite phone capable of Type I encryption accredited by the U.S. National Security Agency for Top Secret voice communications. In addition, the U.S. government continues to make significant investments in a dedicated gateway that provides operational security and allows users of encrypted Iridium handsets to communicate securely with other U.S. government communications equipment. These investments include upgrading the gateway to take advantage of the enhanced capabilities of our network, including Iridium Certus and other enhanced services. This U.S. government gateway is only compatible with our satellite network.

We provide airtime and airtime support to U.S. government and other authorized customers pursuant to our seven-year EMSS contract managed by the U.S. Space Force, which we entered into in September 2019. Under the terms of this agreement, authorized customers utilize our airtime services through the U.S. government’s dedicated