William Blair on ViaSat (VSAT): 'Retaining American Airlines as a customer is a significant win for ViaSat'

William Blair analyst Louie DiPalma reiterated a Market Perform rating and {REMOVEPT} price target on ViaSat (NASDAQ: VSAT)

The analyst comments "This morning, American Airlines (AAL $9.58) announced its plan to launch complimentary Wi-Fi across its ViaSat and IntelSat equipped aircraft. Retaining American Airlines as a customer is a significant win for ViaSat, which is the largest global provider of inflight connectivity with over 3,950 aircraft online, and another 1,570 in backlog. ViaSat is the Wi-Fi service provider for most of the nearly 1,000 aircraft in American Airlines’ mainline fleet. ViaSat originally won the contract to provide Wi-Fi across more than 500 American Airlines aircraft on election day in 2016, in a takeaway from IntelSat. New A321neos and B737 MAX aircraft are line-fit installed with ViaSat’s system. While we believe that American Airlines has been generally pleased with ViaSat’s execution, the satellite provider likely faced significant competition from SpaceX’s Starlink. SpaceX has won Wi-Fi deals with United Airlines (UAL $65.69), Air France, Qatar Airways, WestJet, and SAS. SpaceX recently announced that over 3,000 aircraft (including business jets) are committed to use Starlink’s Wi-Fi service. American Airlines could still use SpaceX’s Starlink for a portion of its widebody fleet. American Airlines has not been able to use ViaSat to provide Wi-Fi on most of its international fleet because ViaSat has experienced delays with its ViaSat-3 satellite constellation"

For an analyst ratings summary and ratings history on ViaSat click here. For more ratings news on ViaSat click here.

Shares of ViaSat closed at $8.40 yesterday.

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