EchoStar exited 2024 with some financial momentum backed mostly by shrewd financial maneuvers but continues to operate under a debt obligation cloud that will again test its management’s ability to thread an operational needle.

At a high level, EchoStar posted a modest year-over-year drop in revenues for the fourth quarter of 2024. That decline was spread across its operating segments, which include its Dish pay-TV service, Boost Mobile wireless service, and Hughes Satellite service.

More significantly, EchoStar burned through approximately $1.2 billion in cash last year, which could have been detrimental to operations. However, management late last year put together a new financing plan that had it ditch $7 billion debt for provide it with $5.5 billion in new financing.

Those deals removed an immediate financial time bomb that EchoStar had been sitting on. But EchoStar has $7 billion in debt obligations due by the end of 2026, including $2 billion due in July of that year.

“We forecast the company will have enough liquidity to fund operational and financial needs through 2025 before a maturity wall in 2026,” S&P Global wrote in a report following the financing move.

One way to boost it financial position is to grow revenues, which so far it has been unable to do. Future revenue growth will require EchoStar to increase its customer base, but that will also require increased funds and undercut its need to grow its bottom line.

“We will focus on acquisition, profitable acquisition. I would not walk away from a profitable acquisition,” EchoStar Hamid Akhavan told investors during the company’s most recent earnings call. “We don't have a shortage of cash right now. I don't have a limitation that prevents me from growing the business profitably and we certainly get paid for that investment. Now I hope I get more customers than is on my budget. And I'm happy to have a decline in my EBITDA as a result of that. That is a solid investment that I get paid for, I get a return on that. At the moment, I don't have a limitation on spending our capital at hand. We are sitting on a significant amount of capital at hand I'd like to put to use. So hopefully, we'll get more customers than we have planned.”

Dave Novosel, senior analyst at corporate bond analyst firm GimmeCredit, noted that the firm does expect “modestly better” customer growth for EchoStar in 2025, “but visibility is limited.” Novosel also echoed EchoStar’s management notion that customer growth will come with additional costs, adding, “therefore, we expect significant operating losses this year and into 2026.”

EchoStar’s pay-TV and satellite operations are not viewed as significant short-term growth opportunities due to market dynamics and timing. This will put pressure on its Boost Mobile wireless business to add those “profitable” customers but will have to do so in a very competitive environment.

Boost Mobile ended the year with approximately 7 million wireless subscribers, which is just a fraction of the more than 100 million subscribers each from established telecom heavyweights Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile US. The carrier has been a market leader in deploying its cloud-native 5G network architecture, which should provide it with an operating cost advantage, but that network is only supporting approximately 1 million subscribers of Boost Mobile’s total customer base.

EchoStar also continues to sit on a treasure trove of wireless spectrum assets that the carrier has valued at around $33 billion, which it could attempt to use to help fund future equity needs. But that task is likely to be complicated by regulatory rules EchoStar has had to agree to in order to extend several license buildout requirements.

“At that point it seems that EchoStar needs either a substantial equity partner or the issuance of more spectrum-backed debt to survive,” Novosel wrote. “We project that leverage will decline in 2025 to roughly 14x because of our estimates for better EBITDA and slightly lower debt.”

EchoStar’s management stated confidence that it will be able to meet its upcoming financial needs.

“We understand our obligations that are ahead of us,” Akhavan said. “We are – just like we did in 2024, we understood our obligations. We met our obligations. We found solutions that puts us in a position to gain and win and create shareholder value, and we have done that. And we will continue to operate with the same fiscal discipline and mindset of shareholder value creation. … We are cognizant of what financial needs we have in the future, and we do intend to stay ahead of our needs with whatever means we have.”

EchoStar’s Boost Mobile network has shown innovation Despite its inability so far to monetize its unique cloud-native architecture, Boost Mobile has shown some unique network innovations.

The carrier recently became the first mobile operator to deploy Nokia’s cloud-native 5G Voice Core product. The deployment has Boost Mobile consolidating several Nokia-provided voice functions into a single Nokia cloud-native network function (CNF) that provides automated deployment and configuration.

Boost Mobile also late last year swapped out a container-as-a-service (CaaS) platform from Broadcom’s VMware division that it has been using since its network inception for a similar platform from Wind River. That Wind River platform now manages all of Boost Mobile’s containerized edge-to-cloud application needs.

Boost Mobile CTO Eben Albertyn told SDxCentral that the vendor swap highlighted the advantage of its unique network architecture in allowing the carrier to make such a deep core change “in a way that our customers won’t even know it’s happening.”

“Boost Mobile is beyond proving open RAN technology works and is now applying component interchangeability through our new engagement with Wind River,” Albertyn said of the move in a statement. “We continue to evaluate performance and the cost effectiveness of our network components and can rapidly pivot to new and different solutions. We aim to ensure our network remains cutting-edge and customers continue to enjoy the benefits of a cloud-native 5G network, including greater reliability, higher speeds and cost-effective services.”

Albertyn had previously told SDxCentral that the swap was based on what he termed “cost effectiveness” or a combination of “operational performance, strategic roadmap, and overall cost.”

“Performance combined with price combined with strategic roadmap going forward, the combination of those, we are able to evaluate with open RAN, decide whether the disposition that we have right now and the vendor landscape that we have right now is at the most optimal inflection point, and if it’s not – as in this case is the matter – so where we consider those three factors combined, and we compare it against what the market is able to offer us, we can see that we can make a better decision when it comes to those three components,” Albertyn said.

John Swearinga, president of technology and COO at EchoStar, during the earnings call built on the financial aspect of that sentiment, noting that the company works with dozens of vendors and “we’re re-evaluating those and changing them all the time.”

“It's sort of like the game of money ball now because we just have a lot of advanced metrics to help us identify exactly where and how we're going to invest,” Swearinga said. “And that's very helpful as it relates to capex, very helpful as it relates to where the next dollar is going to go.”