Dear Colleagues:
As we near the end of 2021, the ELT and I hope that you’re finding time over the holidays to see family and friends, unwind, and reflect on the past year. Thank you for your hard work, dedication, and passion – our success at Anuvu is built on you.
The pandemic feels like a never-ending marathon. Just when we see one wave ending, a new variant emerges. It’s good to see that with Omicron, many governments have not reinstated travel bans that severely impact our business. However, we should continuously be safe by wearing masks, getting vaccinations and boosters, and being vigilant in our travels and interactions with others.
From a business perspective, I am encouraged by the progress we made this year. In Media & Content, we transitioned to Open, built new content partnerships, and continue our service enhancements – including Explore, which we just launched at APEX. Our operations team made real and sustained improvements in media delivery to our customers. It’s an intense competitive environment, and our M&C commercial team rose to the challenge – we enter 2022 with CSP revenue on a good trajectory. With Iris, wireless IFE and our bespoke CSP services, we’ve recently added Asiana, Royal Brunei, the Saudi Royal Fleet and the Royal Fleet of Oman, among other new wins this year.
We’ve brought in talent from the outside – both from competitors and from adjacent industries to bring important new perspectives. In addition, we’ve promoted from within. When we conducted our Engagement Survey, a top area of opportunity was Career Development. We focused on creating opportunities for current team members, something we will continue in 2022. We’ll be launching Internal Job Fairs to raise awareness of opportunities across all areas of the business.
In Connectivity, the pandemic recovery drove an explosion of demand across all our vertical markets – aviation, maritime, energy and government. We started the year successfully executing a massive transition in our satellite network, adding capacity from new partners as we prepared to exit bankruptcy. While we sold our legacy land business to Marlink in March, we continue to support Marlink with our teleports and ground network. Then over the summer, we announced the Anuvu Constellation, our MicroGEO satellites that will be in service by mid-2023.
We expect to use every bit of Constellation capacity. Cruise ships are re-entering service; every indication shows cruise guests expect an at-home experience at sea, for both remote office work and SVOD streaming. Throughput per cruise ship in 2022 is doubling or tripling for larger vessels. At sea and in the air, guests and passengers are using demanding social media applications like TikTok and Instagram that congest both download and upload links. We renewed our flagship contract with Norwegian Cruise Lines and will be greatly increasing their network capacity in 2022. In aviation, we’re increasing performance and have accelerated our modernization efforts, bringing key technologies in house to improve our flexibility. We’ve brought new airlines online this year, including Sun Country, Aeromexico, and Breeze, while Norwegian, Air France, flydubai and Southwest have returned to (more) normal service. Throughout 2021, we’ve worked with Turkish Airlines on their very complex installation program – battling COVID restrictions, quarantines, and setting up for a very busy 2022 in Istanbul.
Another of the Engagement Survey areas of opportunity for us is Recognition – ensuring that Anuvu recognizes teams’ outstanding work on a regular basis. While recognition is important across the full company, we want to Shout Out our Miramar and Lombard teams for their extraordinary efforts this year. We’re entering 2022 with a strong backlog, demonstrating to our customers that we’re making the required investments to prepare for our Constellation and new LEO technology in 2023 and beyond. We send our special thanks to the teams staffing our NOCs and teleports. They kept watch for our customers, both in our offices and remotely, during this year of challenge and accomplishment.
We also want to Shout Out the extraordinary effort by our teams in IT, Finance, Legal, Marketing and People Services teams. We started 2021 with a crippling cyberattack. Our IT, Finance and Legal teams worked long hours to support our Media & Content recovery, on top of our bankruptcy workload. Our Finance team has achieved important milestones – establishing a normal cadence of monthly business reviews, transitioning finance operations onto a new IT platform, and closing the books earlier in the month, on time, every time. Marketing was a renewed area of focus in 2021, building our presence in an aggressive but cost-effective way. We rebranded as Anuvu, and we re-established our social media presence. Now when we make announcements, we can be confident our messaging is heard. Marketing’s support has been critical to our pitches, new wins, trade shows and product announcements this year, and they’ve played an important role supporting People Services too.
Finally, People Services helped us navigate office consolidation and new hires around the world. Throughout, they’ve driven our culture, engagement, diversity and inclusion initiatives, including new training programs. This represents the third major opportunity we identified from our Engagement Survey: Learning and Development. We know that to grow as an organization, Anuvu needs to invest in leadership and business skills. We need to focus on fundamental management tools and training that can help you develop as leaders. To that end, People Services continues to roll out initiatives like the Anuvu Academy, a learning portal with training content, as well as training seminars. Look for these to become more widely available in 2022, as we incorporate what we learned during 2021.
When we look at what we accomplished in 2021 – in revenue recovery and financial stability, client relationships and new wins, technology and product improvements, and game-changing investments in Open and the Anuvu Constellation – we have a lot to be proud of. To those of you who are working over the next two weeks, we thank you for your commitment and recognize your sacrifice to keep our business running. For the rest of us, we hope you enjoy “the gift week” and year-end celebrations. Please recharge and relax before the busy new year starts.
Best wishes for 2022,
JBM
