Hughes Continues Market Leadership in Satellite Network Industry According to Latest COMSYS Report

1 February 2010

Hughes Network Systems, LLC  announced that according to the 2009 COMSYS VSAT Report, Hughes has continued its leadership position in the VSAT (very small aperture terminal) market, having shipped almost 320,000 VSATs across its product lines in 2009—over 26,000 each month. In the enterprise VSAT market, the report confirmed that Hughes has sold more than 165,000 terminals over the past two years, approximately half the total enterprise terminals sold globally and twice that of its nearest competitor. COMSYS is one of the satellite industry's leading analyst firms.

The 2009 report stated that Hughes maintained its market leadership because of significant new developments on both its HN System and HX System platforms, including introduction of the HX260 mesh and multi-gateway product, and its new product sales strategy centered on the flexibility and advanced features of the HX System.

According to Simon Bull, senior analyst at COMSYS, "Hughes is the 800 pound gorilla of the VSAT market…The fact of the matter is that VSAT is Hughes and, in many ways, Hughes is VSAT. The company lives and breathes the technology at all levels from chipsets to installation, not least because it lays claim to having started the industry with its work in the early to late 1980s. As its positive financial results have demonstrated every quarter since it went public in 2006, what sets the company apart today and drives its growth is the service business. Beyond technology and product innovation, over the past several years Hughes has successfully morphed into being the world's leading broadband satellite service provider, as well as supplying a growing list of operators and service provider customers in the rest of the world with its broadband technologies and products."

In the satellite consumer market, COMSYS noted that the company's HughesNet® high-speed Internet service had reached 433,000 subscribers in the U.S. by the end of 2008, over 50 percent of the North American market. Hughes just recently reported that it had crossed the 500,000 subscriber mark.

"We are very pleased to once again be recognized by COMSYS as the market leader in the broadband satellite industry for our innovative technology and our highly successful HughesNet service business," said Pradman Kaul, chairman and CEO of Hughes. "With our announcement of plans to launch Jupiter, a high-throughput, multi-spot beam Ka-band satellite for North America, with over 100 Gbps of capacity, we are well positioned to continue our leadership in this industry."