AST SpaceMobile (NASDAQ:ASTS) has been continuously surging. A satellite unfolds in orbit, a regulator signs off, a carrier signs a contract, and investors keep going back to the buy button. The stock has handed a 161% gain over the last year and the position still feels early, which is evidence that the market has not finished pricing in what this company is building.
ASTS stock is down significantly from its peak, but the momentum is there and it has recovered in earnest from every downturn in the past.
What the company is building
A cell tower floating in low Earth orbit that talks directly to the phone in your pocket. It works without a satellite phone or a special antenna. The phone you bought from Verizon (NYSE:VZ | VZ Price Prediction), working in the middle of nowhere, at broadband speeds. If that vision compiles into reality, the addressable market is the roughly 5 billion mobile subscribers globally who live with connectivity gaps. The partner roster reads like the global carrier rolodex, with over 50 mobile network operators representing nearly 3 billion subscribers, including Verizon, AT&T (NYSE:T), Vodafone, Rakuten, Orange, Telefonica, and stc Group.
The contracted backlog is already in the door
AST SpaceMobile has $1.2 billion in aggregate contracted partner commitments, a $175 million prepayment already in the door from stc Group on a 10-year regional agreement, eight U.S. Government contracts including a prime position on the Missile Defense Agency SHIELD Program and a $30 million Space Development Agency prime contract.
Moreover, Q4 2025 revenue came in at $54.30 million, a 28.56% beat against the $42,241,500 consensus, with year-over-year growth of 2,731.3%. That is the first quarter where the income statement started looking like a real business.
The moat is the spectrum and the carriers
The second reason is the moat, which lives in spectrum and carrier contracts rather than in the satellites themselves. AST holds 1,150 MHz of low and mid-band tunable MNO spectrum globally, 45 MHz of MSS mid-band in North America, and 60 MHz of S-band priority rights globally, sitting behind over 3,700 patent and patent pending claims. Manufacturing footprint now sits above 500,000 square feet across multiple sites at 95% vertical integration. Competitors can launch satellites. Recreating the global spectrum portfolio and the definitive carrier deals is the part that does not bend to capital.
The balance sheet pays for the plan
The third reason is the balance sheet. Cash and equivalents ended Q4 at $2.34 billion, and pro forma liquidity after the $1.07 billion convertible notes offering exceeds $3.9 billion. Capital expenditures hit $1.06 billion in the quarter. The plan is 45 to 60 satellites in orbit by year-end 2026 at a launch cadence of every one to two months. They have the money to do that.
The risk I am willing to underwrite
FY2025 net loss came in at $341.94 million. Q2 2025 revenue missed by 95.29%, Q3 missed by 33.13%, and BlueBird 7 was placed into a lower-than-planned orbit in April. Hiroshi Mikitani, a 10% owner, disposed of 3,040,000 shares across two days in April at $86.22 and $91.42. The stock has put together five 40-55% drawdowns since January 2025. Every one of those reservations is fair. The thesis still holds because space-based reliable internet connections to unmodified phones is a utility once it works, and the company that controls the spectrum and the carrier deals captures it. Mikitani trimming at $90 does not unspectrum the company.
Why the buy button stays active
AT&T and Verizon trade like mature utilities because they sell connectivity where copper and fiber already run. AST is selling connectivity where neither does, to the same phones, through the same carriers, on premium global spectrum it already controls. At a market cap of roughly $27.8 billion against carriers measured in hundreds of billions, the math for a 5x outcome is a plausible re-rating.
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