It is, added Entner, a smart move by Amazon, and with Apple being a major shareholder in Globalstar, the deal did not happen without its approval. “I see winners all around here, and it [also] puts a little bit of a damper on SpaceX and its IPO.”
Scott Bickley, advisory fellow at Info-Tech Research Group, said, “Amazon is acquiring Globalstar primarily for its licensed spectrum, which is one of the hardest assets to secure in telecom, and rarely comes to market from the FCC.”
Globalstar, he pointed out, “has valuable L-band and S-band licenses, which are well-suited for direct to device connectivity and allow regular smartphones to connect to satellites without specialized hardware. That alone can compress Amazon’s timeline by several years.”
Bickley said the deal “also brings existing satellite operations, regulatory relationships, and experience, but this doesn’t materially close the gap with SpaceX. Starlink operates at a completely different scale, with full vertical integration, including its own launch capabilities.”
Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, described the merger announcement as something he has been “tracking for quite some time. This helps Amazon add more infrastructure and spectrum for satellite communications to Amazon Leo, and adds arguably one of the biggest customers in the industry, Apple. This also confirms the rumors that have been swirling for the last few months about Globalstar’s acquisition.”
Globalstar, he added, is a “really interesting company, because Apple owns 20% of it through over $1 billion in investments over the last few years. The CEO, [Paul E. Jacobs] is also Qualcomm’s former CEO and the son of its founder. [He] came on board when Globalstar made a strategic investment in XCOM Global, a company working on XR and 5G technologies.”
