As the satellite industry expands, differentiating your product or service has become more important than ever. On Episode 32 of The Satellite & NewSpace Matters Podcast, we were joined by Adeline Pitrois, the Head of Sales at Latitude, to talk about how the company are setting itself apart by catering to a specific client base. Read on to find out more about how to differentiate your own offerings.
Why should a small-sat or constellation operator choose a dedicated small or light launch provider rather than the larger providers or ride-share agreements?
Ride-share programmes are very good if you’re at the very beginning of your deployment or if you’re in your IoT phase. But dedicated lunches will allow you to optimise your constellation deployment because it will help you deploy your constellations faster. In the end, it’s a question of revenue, which is important when you start to deploy your business and your constellation. It’s also a question of managing your own lunch solution. If you have your own, you do not need to share it with others and to be ready at a certain time. You are also not constrained by specific arbiters who decide to follow you.
When you develop a constellation programme, you want to manage it from the beginning to the end. That is what dedicated launches offer you. It’s very competitive because people very often think that if they buy their own launch solution it will be very expensive. Now, we always speak about the total cost to orbit. I try to change how people think about it – you cannot compare different solutions using the price per kilo, because you have only part of the price when you do that. What is interesting to compare is what we call the total cost to orbit. That starts when your satellite is ready on the ground and ends when new satellites start operating in space. If you take all the costs related to your constellation or the way you will put your satellites in orbit, then you realise that even a dedicated launch solution is competitive compared to a rideshare solution.
This is something nobody can do right now, because we do not have that type of solution except with Rocket Lab, which is currently operating in that market. People need to change the way they see dedicated launch solutions to consider that they are totally free to do what they want with the launch solution and can design 100% of their constellation without any constraint from from from the launch services.
What differentiates an offering like Zephyr from other providers or solutions?
When we speak about competition, it’s often mentioned that we have direct competitors and indirect competitors. Indirect competition could be the biggest launch solution, like the one from either RSA, because we are not targeting the same markets. We do not offer the same the same solution. We could have some projects that overlap, but we have really different targeted markets.
Direct competitors are all Microline solutions like Xavier. The one with the 200-kilogramme capacity in Lille Rocket Lab is a direct competitor. However, latitude will offer a different solution, and we’ll offer the best solution at a very competitive price. We will also offer a very flexible solution, thanks to different elements – one of which is our launch rate. We will target 50 launches per year because that is the key to offering our customers all the different advantages. When you are launching 50 satellites per year, you offer a huge flexibility to your customers, who are then able to deploy a constellation in less than 10 months. Combining these elements at the very beginning of the project will allow us to become a leader in the market.
To hear more about differentiating your satellite products, tune into Episode 32 of The Satellite & NewSpace Matters Podcast here.
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