Tim Ripley
One bumper week in June has transformed Lockheed Martin¹s order book, adding almost $16 billion from the sale of fighters to the United Arab Emirates, frigates to Norway and missile development work to the Pentagon. An upbeat Vance Coffman, chairman and chief executive, says it¹s a welcome about-face from the firm¹s performance last year. Poor profits and programme delays dogged Lockheed Martin during 1999, culminating in the high-profile sacking of senior executives, including Pete Teets and Micky Blackwell.
"We have been making significant progress by methodically addressing the major issues we have faced."
So far this year the company has increased its backlog from $46 billion at the end of 1999 to $57 billion as of 30 June, an increase of almost 25% in six months. "This is a significant turnaround from where we were a few years ago when backlog was falling." says Coffman. "In our second quarter alone, we added $16.7 billion in backlog. Most of that came during one week in late June when we signed the UAE F-16 Fighting Falcon production contract for 80 aircraft, the engineering and manufacturing development contract for THAAD missiles and the production contract to provide five new frigates to the Royal Norwegian Navy." During another one-week period in May, Lockheed Martin signed production contracts with Greece and Israel for a total of 110 F-16s. Meanwhile, Singapore has just announced an additional order for 20 F-16s."We also are proceeding with the sale of the businesses we identified last September as divestiture candidates."
The Hanford environmental remediation unit was sold in late 1999, and since then the sale of the company¹s Control Systems and Aerospace Electronics businesses to BAE Systems has been announced, pending regulatory reviews.
Source: Flight Daily News
