Reaching for the stars
Article Date: Feb 02 2007By 2004, when Avanti floated on AIM raising £3 million, Williams had started to refine his pitch to City investors. As a debt banker, he might once have appreciated in-depth detail, but what the equity market wants is simplicity and focus.
‘Quickly summarising a message is not my first instinct as a Welsh windbag,’ he declares. ‘Less is more in the City. Focus ruthlessly on your best product. Focus on the part of your customer base that is most likely to buy. Cut extraneous people out of your life.’
On holiday in Portugal in 2005, Williams received a call that surprised even him. After six years of negotiation, the government was going to award Avanti a licence to operate a satellite – for free, forever and with €35 million in support. Williams had finally won his argument that space was a growing industry and of strategic national importance. It took him two days to raise the extra €75 million required in the City.
‘Our investors already knew about our satellite vision,’ he says. ‘But I kept the licence a secret from virtually everyone, even at the IPO, because I knew that if I’d said “give me money to put tellies in shops, then in a couple of years I’ll need £100 million to fly my own satellites”, they would have thrown me off the roof. I had to keep it quiet until it was credible enough.’
Demerger makes sense
Suddenly, Williams found himself running two growth companies simultaneously. In January this year, he took the logical step of demerging and refinancing them.
‘It is a bit of a relief,’ he says. ‘I can really focus on what I know and care about. The media company can be run by people who really know the business. We are through the stage when I have to hold it together with brute force; it now has everything it needs to succeed. I am happy to entrust it to the new management.’
Williams intends the launch of the satellite to be just the first step of a journey for Avanti Communications. In the next five to ten years, he wants to build a host of satellites to cover an area from Ireland to India and down to Africa. It’s a vision that he aims to start realising this year.
‘We are pursuing a licence to cover the area with several satellites, and it’s my hope that we can turn ourselves into a transcontinental satellite operator,’ he says. ‘The demand in North Africa, the Middle East, India and Central Asia is large enough to justify a dozen satellites. My ambition is to create a top-three global satellite company.’
It is not entirely in his hands, as his share has been diluted to six per cent. ‘But if shareholders do want to cash out, then I might try to buy their holdings from them,’ he says.
Williams certainly has no interest in leaving the company. Like the true rock star he was originally going to be, his exit plan is ‘to continue to be fabulous until I die’.
