Starlink just notched a win U.S. investors should watch | Official Website of Louis Velazquez, entrepreneur, finance guy and tech innovator

The biggest moves in a stock rarely start where investors are looking. They start in places that never reach the U.S. business pages.

Right now, Wall Street is fixated on one name above almost all others. SpaceX (SPCX) went public on June 12 in the largest initial public offering in history, and the part of the business doing the heavy lifting is not rockets.

It is Starlink’s satellite-to-phone service, the technology that turns an ordinary smartphone into a device that can text and call straight through space.

That service crossed 10 million subscribers earlier this year, and management wants 25 million by December. When I ran those targets against the company’s $1.77 trillion valuation, the math only holds if Starlink keeps winning new countries, and winning them quickly.

That is the bull case. The bear case is just as loud, because SpaceX lost billions last year, which turns every new subscriber into a referendum on whether the growth ever catches up to the spending.

Now one of those countries has said yes. On June 29, Globe Telecom, the Ayala-controlled carrier that dominates the Philippines, secured regulatory approval to commercially launch a direct-to-mobile Starlink service, becoming the first telecom in the country to flip the switch, according to Inquirer.

Why a Philippines Starlink phone deal matters to Wall Street

Satellite-to-phone is no longer science fiction.

SpaceX has launched thousands of Starlink satellites, and the newest ones act like cell towers in space, beaming a signal to any phone with a clear view of the sky.

More Telecommunications:

For most of its life, Starlink sold internet through a pizza-box dish bolted to your roof. The phone version needs no new hardware, which is why it scales fast and why investors now treat it as the clearest path to the $1 trillion in revenue Elon Musk says the company “might be able to reach approximately” by 2030, according to CNBC.

There is one more wrinkle for stock pickers. SpaceX folded Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI into the company earlier this year, so a single SPCX share now buys rockets, satellites, and a chatbot all at once.

Here’s the catch on the phone business, however. The U.S. version has been underwhelming. T-Mobile (TMUS) runs Starlink’s direct-to-cell product in America, and its own chief executive conceded this spring that satellite traffic was barely a rounding error on the network, most of it coming from people stranded in national parks.

So the real growth has to come from somewhere else. It has to come from parts of the world where towers were never built in the first place.

A Starlink’s carrier in the Philippines just got the green light to switch it on.

Gilbert Rondilla Photography / Getty Images

What Globe and Starlink just cleared in Manila

The Philippine approval is the opposite of a rounding error. Globe is switching the service on for a market where roughly 4 percent of people still live outside any mobile signal at all.

The country’s regulator, the National Telecommunications Commission, cleared the launch as part of a push to close the digital divide between connected cities and cut-off provinces.

To work, the service needs a clear line of sight to the sky, but once it connects, it carries far more than emergency texts. Subscribers can make voice and video calls, send messages, and pull up navigation, all routed through orbit.

The rollout starts on Android phones with an active Globe SIM and prices at 99 pesos, about $1.70, for prepaid users, with no extra charge on higher-tier postpaid plans. Even in the most remote or disaster-stricken areas, “Filipinos remain connected,” Globe chief executive Carl Cruz said, according to Inquirer.

That last point is not marketing. Globe tested the technology on more than 150,000 users in the country’s south after a magnitude 7.8 earthquake in June, using it as a backup when the towers went dark.

Strip away the corporate language, and here’s the signal that matters to a stock: Each new country is a checkmark against that 25 million subscriber target. The Philippines, with more than 110 million people and thin rural coverage, is a far bigger prize than another slow weekend in a U.S. national park.

The satellite stocks U.S. investors can actually buy

You cannot buy a slice of the Globe deal, and until July 7, most index funds cannot buy SPCX either. That changes when the stock joins the Nasdaq-100, the moment passive funds will be “forced to sell billions” of existing holdings to make room for it, according to SpotGamma.

In my analysis, that mechanical buying is exactly why a phone deal in Manila quietly matters to a retirement account in Memphis. The stronger Starlink’s subscriber story looks heading into that index event, the more the forced bid has to chew on.

Wall Street is not fully sold. NewStreet Research opened coverage with a $165 target, while CFRA slapped a sell rating and a $115 target on the stock in its first days, betting the price had run out ahead of the cash flow, according to CNBC.

Because that SPCX share also carries rockets and a chatbot, the cleaner ways to bet purely on satellite-to-phone are the rivals and partners that trade on their own.

AST SpaceMobile (ASTS) builds the competing direct-to-phone network behind AT&T (T). Amazon (AMZN) is racing its own constellation, now branded Amazon Leo, toward commercial service. T-Mobile remains the U.S. storefront for Starlink itself.

Here is a quick scoreboard on the engine behind the headline.

Largest IPO ever, about $75 billion raised at a $1.77 trillion valuation, CNBC reported.
Starlink Mobile above 10 million subscribers, targeting 25 million in 2026, according to TheStreet.
SpaceX net loss in the billions in its latest reported quarter, CNBC noted.
SPCX trading near $153, with average analyst price target around $188, according to Investing.com.
Stock joins Nasdaq-100 on July 7, 2026, Investing.com confirmed.

Where the Starlink land grab goes next

The next proof points are already lining up. SpaceX has told investors it wants to sell Starlink phone service straight to U.S. consumers, a move that would turn its carrier partners into rivals overnight, as I covered for TheStreet.

For now, the tell is geography. Watch which countries say yes next, because every Globe-style approval is a brick in the wall holding up that $1.77 trillion valuation, and the first crack will show in the subscriber count long before it shows in the share price.

So the next time a remote village half a world away gets a signal it never had, do not file it under foreign news. If you own a Nasdaq-100 fund after July 7, you will own a sliver of that signal, regardless of whether you meant to.