Forensic Analysis · Communication Services / Telecom · as of Sep 28, 2026
Echostar Corp (ECHO)
A forensic read on Echostar Corp built from its complete SEC filings — financial-health screens, earnings quality, red flags and a price-aware rating. Reproducible math, not opinion.
F · Poor — capital at risk
Forensic grade
Distress
Financial health
-3.4
Distress distance
Clean
Earnings quality
5
Forensic signals
-4.5
P / E (ttm)
-251.4%
ROE
$25.7B
Market cap
0.00%
Dividend yield
-5.2%
Revenue growth
This free snapshot doesn't read filing or proxy text, so the auditor-quality and governance checks that can lower a grade were not evaluated (red flags, auditor quality, say on pay, board independence, going concern, valuation). Those checks only ever lower a grade, so the full analysis can land below the grade above but never above it — treat it as the most favourable reading, not the settled one.
Echostar Corp earns an F (Poor — capital at risk) forensic quality grade, and its balance-sheet distress test reads -3.4, placing it in the Distress zone. 5 forensic signals were flagged in its latest SEC filings, led by return on invested capital.
What the filings flag
-38.8%
FY2025
Return on invested capital.Return on invested capital is -38.8% in the latest fiscal year and slipping across FY2023–FY2025 from -0.4%. After-tax operating profit was ($220M) in FY2023 and ($14.0B) in FY2025, with operating income at -1.6% of revenue in FY2023, -1.9% in FY2024 and -118.1% in FY2025. The capital base behind it came down -28% across FY2023–FY2025, from $50.3B to $36.1B, so this return is struck on a smaller base than it started on. Across FY2024–FY2025, $32.5B went into capital expenditure and purchases of intangible assets against $3.4B of depreciation excluding $114M of intangible-asset amortisation. The base is struck net of amortisation, write-downs and the current liabilities that fund it, so it moved by less than that spending net of the wear, and this row does not say which of those absorbed the difference. FY2023's operating profit carried a $761M asset write-down and a $758M goodwill write-off that alone took about 2.4 points off that year's return, so the FY2025 return is being compared with a base year that charge had already pulled down.
FCF ($1.1B)
FY2025
Shareholder returns.Returned $49M to shareholders (buybacks + dividends) in FY2025, but free cash flow was ($1.1B) after capex — there was no free cash flow to fund the payout from at all, and operating cash flow itself was negative or zero that year too. The entire return is coming from debt or cash reserves, not cash the business itself generated — a harder case than returns merely running ahead of free cash flow, since here there was none to run ahead of.
+3.0%/yr
FY2023–FY2025
Share-count dilution.Diluted share count changed +6% over the last 2 years to FY2025 (+3.0%/yr). The count is growing — 270.8M shares in FY2023, 287.6M in FY2025: more stock was issued than repurchased over this window, so aggregate results grew faster than their per-share equivalents. That's ~3.0% shaved off per-share growth every year — total profit has to grow that much just to keep earnings-per-share flat, and a stake held since FY2023 has been diluted ~6%.
Key fundamentals
Latest Revenue$15.00B
Revenue Growth YoY-5.2%
Revenue CAGR (2yr)-6.1%
Net Margin-96.6%
Free Cash Flow-$1.07B
Return on Equity-251.4%
Debt / Equity4.51x
The forensic grade and screens above are free — no account needed. Want the AI investment read on top — the 0–100 rating, thesis, bull-vs-bear, red flags and the 12-month scenario, written from Echostar Corp's actual 10-K/10-Q/8-K filings?
Stock-based comp load.Stock-based compensation ran 0.2% of revenue in FY2025 — about $0.13 per diluted share. No cash left the business to pay it, which is why operating cash flow adds it back. Net of repurchases the diluted count still rose about 3.0% a year across FY2023–FY2025 and that rate is not falling, so total profit has to grow by that much annually before any of it reaches a share. Stock compensation is one source of that issuance; acquisition consideration, equity raises, convertibles and other employee plans also net into the count, and these figures do not separate them.
$758M
FY2023–FY2023
Goodwill impairments.Took $758M of goodwill writedowns across 1 year (FY2023 ($758M)). Writedowns mean past acquisitions underperformed what was paid for them.