Latin America’s economic roller-coast ride has settled down and East Asian bandwidth prices no longer appear to be under pressure, making 2010 a less dramatic year for the fixed satellite services industry.
Among the larger operators, 2011 was either at or near the peak in planned capital spending on new satellites, spending that has gone to replace retiring spacecraft but also to expand the companies’ footprints.
Some of the companies’ results are distorted by foreign-exchange effects. Depending on where the U.S. dollar stood against local currencies, a down year might look up, and vice versa.
Companies listed here are providers of fixed satellite services, leasing capacity on geostationary-orbiting spacecraft for video, data and voice traffic.
Mobile satellite services providers and direct-broadcast television providers using their own satellites are not included. Mobile satellite operators such as Inmarsat, Iridium, Globalstar, Thuraya and Orbcomm are thus absent, as are direct-broadcast television companies DirecTV and Dish Network.
Also not appearing this year are companies for which reliable estimates of revenue were not obtained by press time, but whose businesses are big enough to figure in these rankings.
