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RigNet (NASDAQ:RNET) Q4 2018 Earnings Conference CallMarch 15, 2019 11:00 a.m. ET
Contents: Prepared Remarks Questions and Answers Call Participants Prepared Remarks:Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to RigNet's fourth-quarter 2018 conference call. My name is Victor, and I will be your coordinator for today. [Operator instructions] And I will now turn over the presentation to Lee Ahlstrom, RigNet's senior vice president and chief financial officer. Mr.
Ahlstrom, please proceed.
Lee Ahlstrom -- Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Thank you, Victor, and good morning, and welcome to RigNet's fourth-quarter and full-year 2018 earnings call. A copy of our earnings press release with supporting schedules, including schedules which reconcile the non-GAAP metrics we'll discuss today to the appropriate GAAP metrics, is posted to our website, www.rig.net, under our Investor Relations page. For those of you who would like the release in PDF format, that is posted as well. Before we get started, I'd like to make you aware that we will be making forward-looking statements today.
Any statements that are not historical facts, including statements related but not limited to market expectations and future plans are forward-looking statements that involve certain risks, uncertainties and assumptions. These include, but are not limited to risks associated with the general nature of the oil and gas industry, customer and other third-party interactions, any discussion of the GX arbitration proceedings and possible outcomes and other factors detailed in the Risk Factors section of RigNet's most recent annual report on Form 10-K, and in our other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those indicated. RigNet disclaims any duty to update the information presented on this call.
And now, I'd like to turn the call over to Steve Pickett, RigNet's chief executive officer and president. Steve?
Steve Pickett -- Chief Executive Officer and President
Thank you, Lee. Welcome, everyone, to the call and thank you for joining the call. This morning, we'll review some of the key highlights of the fourth quarter and the full year and we'll share a bit about our roadmap ahead. Then Lee will go through some of the financial highlights.
Following that, as always, we'll open it up for questions. Yesterday, after the market closed, RigNet reported a net loss for the fourth quarter of $49.7 million or $2.62 per share based on revenues of $60.2 million. For the full year, we reported a net loss of $62.5 million or $3.34 per share on revenues of $238.9 million. Earnings for both the fourth quarter and the full year included a $50.6 million net noncash charge related to the results from Phase I of the GX arbitration proceedings.
We'll talk a little more about that, but if we adjust out this onetime, noncash charge, earnings for the fourth quarter would have been $0.9 million or $0.05 per share, and for the full year, net loss would have been $11.8 million or $0.63 per share. Adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP measure we define in our press release and one of our key performance metrics, was $10.5 million for the fourth quarter, up just under 21% from the third quarter. Full-year adjusted EBITDA was $34.8 million, up 17% from 2017. Our fourth quarter was marked by continuing strong operational performance despite a decline in quarterly revenue, driven largely by lower equipment sales in our managed communication services segment and our Apps & IoT segment, which are difficult to predict, the company executed well across all three of our business segments in the face of headwinds created by a nearly $30 drop in Brent oil prices during the quarter.
Let me touch on some highlights for the quarter in each of the segments. In our managed communication services business, we won a number of new contracts and expanded our business with our fleet customers. Business in the Gulf of Mexico was strong despite competition. We did lose a number of sites during the quarter, particularly in the land business where customers tend to respond more quickly to commodity price changes.
We've already seen a rebound in that category since the start of the year. Our offshore rigs site count declined by seven net rigs, including five Noble rigs between the third and fourth quarter. We're expecting the final Noble rigs to roll off during the first and possibly second quarter of 2019. These roll-offs, along with other softness due to offshore oil and gas market challenges, cause us to forecast quarter-over-quarter declines in revenue and adjusted EBITDA in the first half of the year.
Despite this, we're looking forward to continued improvement in the offshore industry, and based on public announcements made by our customers, we expect off-shore spending to be up modestly later in 2019 and more significantly in 2020. Nonetheless, one highlight for the MCS, or the managed communication services business, is that we executed a new exclusive fleetwide contract with an offshore drilling contractor with a term of three years. This includes rigs currently in operation, some of which were already served by RigNet as well as any rigs which were brought online during the three-year contract period. I'm also pleased to share that we now have approximately 60% of the Gulf of Mexico LTE network now operating and carrying live traffic.
This is a significant achievement by the team and is an important service upgrade to RigNet's current Gulf of Mexico digital microwave infrastructure, adding 4G and 5G-enabled LTE capability with mobility including rowing coverage in addition to making available point-to-point LTE business services. When fully complete, this network will span a coverage area of up to approximately 45,000 square miles for B2B applications and up to approximately 30,000 square miles for consumer applications. This new LTE network leverages low-band spectrum, which is able to penetrate offshore assets more effectively than higher-frequency solutions. We look forward to sharing more about this important investment in the near future.
In our Apps & IoT segment, we had our strongest year yet with year-over-year growth of 65%, while launching new products and driving new business lines. Intelie, our real-time machine learning platform, is being received with enthusiasm by customers as they discover the diverse applications where we can deliver actionable results that drive operational and financial improvement. During the quarter, we signed a new Intelie contract with a major drilling contractor for a three-year term where we will be helping the company monitor its BOPs and key rig systems. In addition, Intelie is also being considered by a second drilling contractor, the one I mentioned earlier, where we had exclusively secured the managed communications services business.
So our strategy of closing business in one of our business segments and then pulling through business in another is working. We also continued to make progress on serving oil and gas operators with Intelie. We've just signed an agreement with Petrobras, the national oil company of Brazil, that allows us to resell the applications that we have developed together. Additionally, we've just signed agreements with another supermajor to develop applications for Intelie where they will fund development of individual modules through their R&D budgets and we will have the full intellectual property.
This will help us rapidly increase the offerings we have in the Intelie app store, which runs on the Intelie platform. A number of paid proof-of-value trials are under way at other operators with opportunities which range from real-time monitoring of offshore rigs to planning new wells, to monitoring fracking performance on unconventional wells in the Permian Basin. Since the acquisition of Intelie, just 11 months ago, we secured orders with three supermajors, one of the largest drilling contractors in the world and with the growing North American-based fracking company. We've also secured orders for paid POVs, proof-of-value trials, with two other supermajors.
In terms of our cybersecurity solution, Cyphre, it's also seeing significant interest, both with our direct sales team as well as through our channel partners, which now include AT&T, SingTel and Arabsat, which was announced in the fourth quarter. We have a group of companies trialing Cyphre in the energy space and we've made some encouraging progress in the government vertical. We've also launched a few new solutions, including v
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