BlackSky Technology Inc. (NYSE:BKSY) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Griffin Boss: Great. Really helpful. Thanks for that, Brian. And then last one for me. Can you just help me understand the strategic rationale for your X-Bow investments? I believe you own 13.5 million shares, something like that. Is that an asset that you aim to monetize at some point in the future? Or just any sort of color you can give about how you think about that business would be great.

Brian O’Toole: Yes, that was an investment we made several years ago. We always believe that access to space is an important aspect of our strategy in the market. And so, we were involved in the early days with that company and that’s a small element of our balance sheet right now.

Griffin Boss: Got it. Okay. All right. Well, thanks for all my questions. Appreciate it guys, and have a great day.

Brian O’Toole: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question has come from the line of Caleb Henry with Quilty Analytics. Please proceed with your questions.

Caleb Henry: Hi, guys. A couple of questions. First about EOCL, I think you previously forecast revenues of $18 million for 2022 and $36 million for 2023. Are those forecasts still on track?

Brian O’Toole: Yes, I think — on EOCL, we’re — just as a reminder, right, we just started that contract last July. So, it’s been just about nine months. And we’re operating really well. We’re delivering thousands of images a day. And we ramped up within 30 days of the start of that contract to deliver that volume of imagery and we’re meeting all of our performance requirements. So, yes, we were — as we’ve said publicly, when we were awarded the contract, we were awarded initial services for two years that reach — that are up to $36 million. So that’s our assumption for this year, correct.

Caleb Henry: Okay. And then, just a question on launches. You said you have an upcoming Gen-2 launch. Is that the last Gen-2 satellite launch? And are there any other spacecraft launching this year? Or is it nothing until Gen-3 starts in 2024?

Brian O’Toole: Those we expect will be our last two Gen-2s. We have some spares. We’re not — we haven’t decided we’re going to launch them or not. And then, as I mentioned, we’ll begin launching Gen-3s in 2024. And as we progress with that, we’ll provide some more details.

Caleb Henry: Okay. You guys had a nice bump in Q4 margins. Can you comment on where you expect imagery margins to trend in 2023? And kind of is it reasonable to assume like 80% margins this year?

Henry Dubois: Caleb, this is Henry. And as we’ve been discussing on margins, it really comes down to the fact that we’ve got a very fixed — the nature of the fixed cost structure that we have when we’re delivering imagery and analytics, given the fact that those are all pretty much automated processes. So, we’ve got very small incremental cost. And when you take a look at that slide that I was referencing earlier, we see the $47 million of revenue against the $13 million of costs relative to — as compared to $15 million of revenue and $11 million of costs last year, you can kind of — I would be looking at it from perspective of GSE. Our incremental revenue will continue at that — kind of that high 80%-s, maybe 90%-s, I mean, 92%, this — for the full year could be extremely high.