CITY INTERVIEW: Avanti boldly goes on expansion quest after value of the satellite tech firm rockets from £9,000 to £340m

All chief executives dream of taking their company into the stratosphere, but Avanti boss David Williams has gone much further than that.

His firm is the proud owner of two satellites, Hylas 1 and Hylas 2, in orbit above the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic.

They provide coverage to 70 countries on three continents, beaming everything from high-definition television to broadband signals into hard-to-reach areas with minimal ground infrastructure.

Stratospheric: Avanti, which was worth £9,000 when Williams joined, is today valued at £340million

Avanti’s third satellite, Hylas 3, is due to hitch a ride on the Ariane 5 rocket, launching from French Guiana in 2015 in partnership with the European Space Agency.

‘I was two months old when the lunar landing happened and it figured large in my childhood,’ says Williams.

‘For my generation space was a very big thing and I gravitated towards the Star Wars films.’

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He would also be interested in space tourism but admits that it’s ‘beyond my budget at the moment’.

If Avanti continues growing at the pace it has done, he may not have too long to wait before the price of a ticket is within reach.

The company was founded by astrophysicist David Bestwick in 1996 to advise other firms on how best to use satellite technology.

When Williams bought into the company in 2002 it was worth £9,000. His wife lent them £10,000 and they started the company in his spare room. Today it has a market value of £340million and has raised some half a billion pounds of funding.

The shareholder register boasts some serious long-term investors, including the likes of M&G, Singaporean wealth fund GIC and Capital Research Group.

The most obvious market for Avanti is providing connections for large internet service providers, particularly in remote parts of the world where there is little ground infrastructure.

Avanti also builds private networks for business and provides so-called ‘carrier services’ for telecoms companies, which use satellite connection to fill in gaps between mobile phone masts and their own exchanges.

Security and defence is another lucrative market, with secure and reliable connections essential for such secretive endeavours.

With two satellites already in orbit, Williams says the firm has reached the stage where it is more or less able to ‘cherry pick’ customers from the areas it covers.

Getting there hasn’t been easy.

Every industry has barriers to entry, but the hurdles in getting expensive equipment into space are particularly high.

‘We’ve beaten off some pretty stiff challenges from competitors, who tend to be ex-governmental or quasi-governmental and sometimes don’t really enjoy the cut and thrust of competition from start-ups,’ Williams recalls.

One would imagine it should be easy for more established competitors to elbow a newcomer aside.

‘They have tried very hard,’ he sighs, referring obliquely to an acrimonious feud with satellite operator SES.

The rival firm enlisted the government of Luxembourg, where it is based, to protest that Hylas 2 might interfere with their own kit. Its objections failed.

Williams thinks Avanti has survived these battles partly because it is ‘smarter and more nimble’ than competitors.

‘They act like elephants, lumbering around trying to push us around,’ he says, noting that his firm has dodged the sharp tusks of its rivals partly thanks to help from the British government.

‘It was only because they [the government] play by the rules and stuck behind us that we’ve been able to have a 100pc victory.’

Now Avanti is looking to a future in which the growth of emerging markets will underpin its own expansion. Africa, says Williams, is the biggest opportunity ‘by a long chalk’.

‘In Africa there is huge impatience for the delivery of broadband and nobody can wait for fibre to be laid.’

‘We proved our technology in Europe, but the real revenue-generating opportunities are in Africa and the Middle East.’

Indeed, African governments building infrastructure are ‘jumping ahead of Europe’ and going straight to wireless technology.

Furthermore, those nations have ‘no sovereign debt crisis, no recession’.

Even in the world’s worst trouble spots, Avanti has found opportunities to sell its services, to television news broadcasters for instance. ‘You can do high definition broadcasting from the front line in Syria, Libya, wherever you are with kit that costs a few hundred dollars and is portable.’

The pictures beamed out of Libya during the uprising against Colonel Gaddafi ‘could have been on Avanti’ he admits, although he won’t say whether they were.

‘The big benefit of satellite is ubiquity. From 36,000 kilometres above the earth with one satellite, you can potentially see a third of the surface of the earth.’

Having built a company with such a broad horizon, Williams feels fairly sanguine about life.

‘We are finding the success that we hoped for and I’m pretty relaxed. We’re at that phase about collecting the cash, solidifying our advantages and running a business efficiently.

A period of relative calm may perhaps give him more time for his new found pastime, running. He managed a 10k last year ‘after 20 years of doing less sport than I should have done’.

‘I’ve got the bug,’ he admits.

The Cardiff-born executive is also a keen rugby fan who is ‘still very bitter’ that Irish referee Alain Rolland, who has a French father, sent off the Wales captain Sam Warburton in the 2011 World Cup semi-final against France.

He still plays guitar and has a Fender Stratocaster at home ‘and a Peavey amplifier, a chorus pedal and distortion pedal’.

‘The other day I was playing some Rolling Stones numbers.’

Perhaps their 1967 single 2000 Light Years Away would be appropriate.