Reaching for the stars
Article Date: Feb 02 2007
Over the next two years, David Williams, who is founder and chief executive of Avanti Communications at just 37 years old, has €110 million ( £66.2 million) to spend on launching a 2.5-ton satellite the size of a Land Rover Discovery.
Williams believes that for the 15 years of its service life, his satellite will snatch the lucrative market for corporate data from slow-moving rivals locked into Europe’s huge demand for satellite TV.
According to industry figures, there are between six and nine million potential users of these services in Europe. ‘We only need 300,000 to fill our satellite and make more money than we could dream of,’ says Williams.
‘The economics of space are exceptional and closely resemble those of the oil business,’ he continues. ‘It’s difficult to get a licence to drill for oil in a great place, but if you get the licence and sink the well when the price is high, you’ve got it made – you’re Cairn Energy. I’m the lucky guy who got the licence to build the satellite in an area where there is undersupply and high pricing.’
Such stargazing was not Williams’ first ambition. Born in Cardiff to rowing parents, the family moved eight times while he was growing up, until his mother and father eventually separated acrimoniously. The experience, he says, left him with a refusal to trust anyone and a somewhat belligerent attitude.
In 1987, he escaped to university at Leeds to read economics and pursue his real ambition in rock music. He became lead singer of The Watchmen, who played some big gigs and put out several singles, but never quite landed a recording contract.
A stage mentality
‘Being an entrepreneur and a lead singer are very similar,’ he says. ‘You’re the guy who gets booed off stage if it all goes wrong, but you’re also the one who gets all the plaudits if it goes well.’
When the band fell apart he ended up working in a bank in London in 1991. He then trained as a risk analyst and spent most of the 1990s writing business plans and providing debt finance for telecoms companies. Stints at Chase Manhattan, Canadian outfit CIBC and merchant bankers Babcock & Brown saw him advising cable TV and mobile networks, and working with big names such as Alcatel and Marconi on financing satellite projects.
‘Senior debt might not have been the most exciting end of banking, but it was a fabulous place to learn how to build a business,’ he says.
By 1999, a number of pennies were beginning to drop. ‘I realised that I was a dreadful banker,’ says Williams. ‘I was no good at corporate politics and I can’t take orders!’
He’d also had the foresight to spot satellite as an opportunity. In analysing risks in the telecoms market, he knew that terrestrial networks were never going to be able to satisfy the leap in demand for data that everyone was predicting.
‘Satellite is much better at pushing high rates of data around,’ he says, ‘but in the late ’90s it was a bad place to be because silly money was being spent on trying to create mobile networks.’
