Company: IRDM
Filing Date: 2025-02-13
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001628280-25-005302
Chunk: 40

Company: Iridium Communications Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-02-13
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 40
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 modules and chipsets. We also develop network and product enhancements and new applications for our existing products. Our research and development expenses were $28.4 million, $20.3 million and $16.2 million for the years ended December 31, 2024, 2023, and 2022, respectively.

Employees and Human Capital Resources

Employees

As of December 31, 2024, we had approximately 873 full-time employees and eight part-time employees, none of whom are subject to any collective bargaining agreement. We consider our employee relations to be good.

Human Capital Resources

Our employees are integral to our success. We must continue to identify, attract, develop, motivate, and retain highly skilled employees across many fields, and we use a variety of human capital measures in managing our business, including measures related to hiring, performance evaluations, retention and workforce demographics.

We strive to create an innovative and welcoming culture where our employees are proud to work. We foster this goal by focusing on employee development, engagement, and wellness. This starts with an onboarding process that introduces our core mission and values, policies and procedures, performance review process and background about our company. We support our employees in their career development by providing on-the-job training and education reimbursement to help employees maintain or enhance skills in their current position or help with acquiring new skills to prepare for future opportunities. To measure employee engagement, we conduct an annual survey to assess and track retention and satisfaction. We take responses from our employees seriously and use them to inform specific strategies tailored to both the entire company as well as specific teams. In addition to performing benchmarking for employee benefits, we conduct an annual survey to understand what benefits are important to our employees and ensure that we are offering a competitive total rewards package.

We also seek to attract and retain a skilled workforce, including through programs such as our internship program, our Iridium Orbit Program (an 18 month rotational program in operations, engineering and customer care), or Uplinks program (a program pairing employees from different generations to promote collaboration and diversity of thinking), our Employee Resource Groups and other outreach efforts that cover a range of topics and interests. We structure our human capital management to comply with the laws and regulations to which we are subject as a federal government contractor.

Intellectual Property

At December 31, 2024, we held 46 U.S. patents and one foreign patent. These patents relate to several aspects of satellite systems, global networks, communications services, and communications devices.

In addition