During the first quarter, Orbcomm saw service revenues up from USD4.8m in the first quarter of 2008 to USD6.6m over the same period this year, while revenues from product sales fell from USD1m to USD0.7m. The growth in service revenues helped total revenues climb from USD5.8m last year to USD7.3m.
“The company’s strategy is to focus on the generation of revenue through its network and exit the hardware business to attract multiple hardware vendors to support, develop, and distribute Orbcomm enabled modems,” it said.
Orbcomm said the growth in service revenues is predominantly due to “an increase in billable subscriber communicators”, with a number of OEM agreements recently tied up, including one with Manitowoc.
“At March 31, 2009, there were more than 476,000 billable subscriber communicators, a 25.4% increase over the first quarter of 2008,” Orbcomm said. “Net satellite subscriber additions during the quarter were over 16,000 while net terrestrial subscribers were flat due to disconnects from one customer. During the first quarter of 2009, more than 90% of net additions were attributable to installations by OEMs.”
Manitowoc announced Orbcomm would deliver the satellite network for CraneSTAR in April. The crane company describes CraneSTAR as “the most comprehensive asset management system our industry has ever seen”.
