On July 31st Amazon filed its draft prospectus covering its proposed acquisition of satellite operator Globalstar. The prospectus revealed that there were three other potential bidders for Globalstar (Party A, B and C).

Tim Farrar (of TMF Associates) has researched these three would-be buyers. He says: “Globalstar and Amazon began meeting between March and September 2025 about a potential strategic collaboration. Amazon signed an NDA on September 12th and on October 16 submitted an initial price indication of $47.50 per Globalstar share in cash (~$6B). An updated bid of $65 in Amazon stock (or $75 in cash for public shareholders) was submitted on November 12th, and then updated to $70 per share in Amazon stock on November 18th. Finally on December 1st, this was revised to $90 per share in cash or $70 in Amazon stock (later increased to $75), with a maximum of 40 per cent of the consideration in cash, and Globalstar signed an exclusivity agreement on December 6th. Although exclusivity expired briefly over the holidays, it was subsequently renewed and extended repeatedly to allow for finalization of the arrangements between Amazon and Apple and the deal was finally announced on April 14th.”

Farrar details the various bids and the history of the bidding process, and asks who the three other bidders could be.

“It’s pretty clear that Party C is SpaceX given that the structure they proposed is very similar to that with EchoStar: 50/50 stock/cash, with an expectation that the stock ‘would likely appreciate’. It is notable that a major barrier to Party C’s bid was a lack of any agreement with Apple, which fits with what I posted last September about the pressure SpaceX was putting on Apple, and prior demands for Apple to pay billions of dollars for exclusivity,” said Farrar.

Party B appears to be T-Mobile or Deutsche Telekom, which were involved in the process, after deciding not to pay up for EchoStar’s AWS-4 last summer, but didn’t make a particularly serious attempt to win. The timing also fits with T-Mobile dropping out of the bidding for AWS-4 in July and commencing due diligence at the beginning of September once it became clear that SpaceX was likely to buy EchoStar’s spectrum, notes Farrar.

Party A appears to be either RocketLab or AST SpaceMobile: the giveaway here is the 60-day VWAP (Volume-weighted Average Price) between mid-September and mid November 2025, which covers a period when the share price of both companies surged to a peak before falling back. In my view it was probably the former, since RocketLab would already have been meeting with Globalstar between February and June 2025 to discuss “other things”, namely the delayed replacement satellites. And RocketLab is less likely than AST to have been interested in retaining “certain spectrum licences” (presumably terrestrial Band 53 rights).

Farrar suggests that with A, B and C unsuccessful in their bid there could be movement elsewhere, noting: “There’s little chance that AST SpaceMobile and Viasat could reach a meeting of minds over L-band, and RocketLab is off the table after the recent Iridium deal. SpaceX doesn’t need more MSS spectrum right now (and certainly not Viasat’s spectrum which is mostly outside the US): if anything, SpaceX will be buying US terrestrial spectrum, most plausibly EchoStar’s Citizen Band (CBRS) spectrum to facilitate a potential cable partnership for Starlink Mobile V2.”

“As a result, I think bidders for Viasat’s spectrum are likely to be scarce or non-existent, and despite the challenges that Equatys faces after the loss of RocketLab, it looks like Viasat will continue trying to build a D2D constellation, rather than selling its spectrum to others. Or as Viasat said on the results call, what we’re holding up for is to have the next announcement, which really would be about the Equatys purchase of its initial satellite constellation,” concludes Farrar.

Other posts by :

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2. Rocket Lab: “We will out-innovate SpaceX”
3. S&P ranks Arqiva’s debt as BBB+
4. AST SpaceMobile to make D2C progress this winter
5. EchoStar to put Hughes Network into bankruptcy
6. FCC explains C-band incentives
7. Analyst: Deep dive on Starlink’s prospects
8. Musk: “AI is inevitable”
9. Airbus Space says business is booming

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Tags: amazom, globalstar