EchoStar sells its broadcast unit, including nine satellites, to Dish for $800 million

Dish Networks' purchase of EchoStar's broadcast satellite services business includes the EchoStar-23 satellite and eight other satellites.

EchoStar has sold his business satellite broadcast services a Dish Networks for 800 million dollars, thus focusing on Internet connectivity from now on.

The sale includes nine satellites (half of EchoStar's fleet when counting leased payloads), associated properties and the licensing of one orbital position. In addition, the personnel assigned to this unit will be integrated into the Dish workforce.

About 90 percent of EchoStar's streaming satellite services revenue comes from Dish contracts. EchoStar's Satellite Services division, which counts broadcast revenue, dropped nearly 10 percent last year to $358 million, and had little room for growth, according to EchoStar. The business faced lower capacity pricing pressure across the industry, compounded by difficulty attracting additional customers as many viewed Dish as a competitor.

The CEO of EchoStar, Mike Dugan, has assured that this operation "will allow EchoStar to focus our efforts on our high-growth broadband services business and other initiatives, while eliminating a negative growth component of our financial performance and the risk associated with providing services to a solitary customer."

The divestiture follows a “stock exchange deal” EchoStar made with Dish in early 2017, where EchoStar traded its EchoStar Technologies business for all of Dish's Hughes Retail preferred tracking stock.

EchoStar's latest investments have been in Hughes Network Systems, which was also its largest revenue generator. Hughes accounted for $1.717 billion of EchoStar's $2.091 billion in revenue last year.

EchoStar is currently manufacturing with Maxar Technologies a new satellite called Jupiter-3 that is designed to offer 500 gigabits per second of Internet connectivity capacity.