Even so, they were up to about a billion dollars in debt for satellites, engineering services and launch services by the time the original Iridium corporation went bankrupt around 2001... I'm not sure how much good their cost savings did for them. It's not really that they pioneered mass-assembly of satellites, but that there had never been a large low earth orbit network of identical satellites before. The new Iridium satellites and anything else built in quantities of 10+ will be built using a similar assembly line fashion.
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Sure, but with a fleet of a good fraction of 100 satellites, it's not going to be cheap however you slice it, especially given the launch costs back then. 70-odd satellites in the initial constellation, 15 launches, that's a billion in launch costs and over a third of a billion in satellite manufacturing costs, aside from R&D. Nevertheless, they easily saved... at a minimum $3 billion and as much as maybe $7-10 billion by doing it the way they did. Which was, I'll point out, a very revolutionary practice that has been widely regarded by the industry as being such. If they hadn't done it that way they wouldn't have been able to get off the ground at all, most likely.
Also of note, the launch market has changed for the better considerably since then. Despite having the same constellation size for Iridium Next and slightly larger satellites (by about 15%) they'll be able to get them deployed with only 10 launches at a total cost of $490 million.
Of course, now the market has largely caught up with their vision so they're doing a lot better financially.
Iridium Next has a lot more revenue potential for them as well, with all sorts of new products that can be developed with embedded Iridium modems (same general way they sell the 9602 transceiver to manufacturing partners now).
The fact that you can do TCP/IP data over the first generation Iridium network is actually kind of a minor miracle, the data rates are so low. Voice calls have to fit in 2400 bps with a special codec. Data sessions used a lossless compression system not very dissimilar from v42bis to squeeze up to 9600 baud out of a 2400 bps connection... Well, at least if all you're transferring is a plain text file, if it's content that's already compressed you literally see 0.2KB/second.
They're going after the revenue that Inmarsat enjoys from BGAN services, Thuraya's revenue stream from BGAN-like L/S-band services, etc. Maritime and aircraft of course. And military... and military and civilian UAVs... all sorts of stuff. M2M stuff that has to work literally anywhere.