During the IPO roadshow, Musk sold investors on future plans to launch data centers into space and build a colony on Mars. Analysts at its lead underwriter Goldman have predicted a 100-fold surge in its AI revenues to $322 billion by 2030.
While describing expanding Starlink as another key growth pillar in its IPO prospectus, SpaceX has never publicly confirmed that it plans to launch a retail mobile service.
There have been months of speculation over SpaceX’s future mobile plans after it paid $17 billion to rival EchoStar for wireless spectrum licenses to bolster its Starlink satellite network last September. Many analysts viewed the deal as laying the groundwork for an eventual retail offering.
In its bond offering prospectus, seen by the FT, SpaceX said that while it expected the Starlink Mobile service currently “to be most impactful for customers in remote areas uncovered by terrestrial mobile networks,” its longer-term ambitions appeared broader.
As its performance improves and satellite constellation grows, the prospectus suggests the company would “compete to be the preferred connectivity experience to our customers no matter where they are located, whether in rural, suburban or urban areas.”
The launch of a consumer Starlink mobile retail service would also complement the company’s existing broadband Internet option, which served 10.3 million customers worldwide as of March.
However, the plans have been met with trepidation by analysts who have cautioned that the idea may simply be a gamble to extract better deals from Starlink’s telecoms partners and warned of the billions of dollars in build costs and radio wave spectrum needed to roll out mobile networks.
New Street Research estimates that the three US mobile network operators have a total of about 1,020MHz of spectrum, while SpaceX has just 65MHz.
David Barden, partner at New Street Research, said that building a “wireless network in saturated markets around the world would be incredibly hard.”
“[But] as a starting point for negotiating the best possible revenue-sharing deal with mobile network operator partners? It makes tremendous sense,” he added.
Additional reporting by Ryan McMorrow in San Francisco
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