*Eugene and Ben have not been appointed to VSAT’s Investor Relations Team. This is meant in a humorous manner due to the number of podcasts carried out covering VSAT by Ben Claremon and Eugene Robin. With that said, read on!

For the third time over the last year or so, Eugene Robin and I had the opportunity to discuss our position in Viasat (ticker: VSAT) in an interview. Andrew Walker, who runs the great Yet Another Value Podcast, peppered the two of us with some challenging questions that I think many investors also have. After going back through the conversation, the first point that Eugene made really struck me as the most important. People still think of VSAT as a play on U.S. rural broadband. However, our contrarian perspective is that owning VSAT is really a play on demand for global inflight WIFI and the company’s ability to provide unique connectivity solutions to the U.S. military and our allies. We get tons of questions about the threat posed by Elon Musk and Starlink and we absolutely acknowledge that the road to success in U.S. rural broadband is not as easy the company had previously thought. But nothing that Starlink (or any of the other low earth orbit (aka LEO) players) is doing fundamentally changes the other growth opportunities for VSAT. This is why VSAT remains one of our largest positions in both the Classic Value Small Cap and Small Cap PLUS strategies.

Please have a listen and watch the video if you are interested in diving even deeper into our perspective on VSAT.

We have also made available the slides from our previous livestreamed presentation if you want to reference them during the podcast. You can download them here.

-Ben Claremon