Valued at $30 billion, Britain’s biggest defence manufacturer, BAE Systems has entered into a definitive Stock Purchase Agreement to acquire the Ball Aerospace business, which is a subsidiary of Ball Corp, world’s largest manufacturer of beer cans & aluminium packaging material for $5.56bn.
Headquartered in Colorado, Ball Aerospace is a leading provider of spacecraft, mission payloads, optical systems, and antenna systems to customers like the Intelligence Community, US Department of Defense, and civilian space agencies.
This is another big acquisition in the defence space domain, where Ball Aerospace will help BAE Systems to accelerate next-generation solutions across a number of their US businesses like Electronic Warfare and C4ISR; and will add further resilience to the existing franchises in the face of evolving customer needs and emerging technologies.
Charles Woodburn, Chief Executive of BAE Systems, said, “The proposed acquisition of Ball Aerospace is a unique opportunity to add a high quality, fast growing technology focused business with significant capabilities to our core business that is performing strongly and well positioned for sustained growth. It’s rare that a business of this quality, scale and complementary capabilities, with strong growth prospects and a close fit to our strategy, becomes available.”
How will Ball Aerospace strengthen BAE System’s portfolio?
Ball Aerospace is the leading provider of mission critical space systems and defence technologies across air, land and sea domains. With strong growth potential in areas aligned with the US Intelligence Community and Department of Defense’s highest priorities, they bear an attractive positioning and outlook across military and civil space, C4ISR and missile and munition markets.
With highly complementary fit adding material scale of high calibre space, optical and antenna solutions; and Excellent cultural fit with a long and distinguished track record of innovation and product development, they have delivered a substantial investment in world class facilities and capabilities in the last five years to support growth. They have substantially increased their US classified revenues, offerings and embedded customer relationships.
Woodburn added, “The strategic and financial rationale is compelling, as we continue to focus on areas of high priority defence and Intelligence spending, strengthening our world class multi-domain portfolio and enhancing our value compounding model of top line growth, margin expansion and high cash generation.
“We couldn’t be more pleased to have reached this agreement and we look forward to welcoming the employees of Ball Aerospace to BAE Systems as we work together to support our customers and create value for shareholders.”
“Ever since the Ukraine conflict there has been an increasing demand for mission critical space systems and other space assets. Space has traditionally enjoyed high investments from defence sector, but now the momentum is growing even more”, says a geospatial industry observer.
“Bell’s acquisition, which is arguably the biggest in space & defence domain since Maxar was bought by the Boston based Equity Investor Advent International, and then delisted, purportedly to be geared towards Geoint needs, shows the all-time-high demand for space in alignment with defence needs”, he adds
“Ball corps, a world-leading aluminium packaging material firm, divesting its niche and lucrative Aerospace division shows that core portfolio diversification and domain expertise consolidation are not always mutually reinforcing, or two sides of the same coin. The choice can be an either/ or as well depending on contingencies”, says Aditya Chaturvedi, Associate Editor, Geospatial World.
BAE Systems’ other achievements
Recently, BAE Systems’ Fast Labs research and development organisation won a contract of $14 million from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) for the Massive Cross Correlation (MAX) program. BAE Systems is going to develop technology aimed at enabling the deployment of advanced signal processing and computation on a smaller category of military platforms.
Signal processing is at the heart of critical Department of Defense (DoD) technology such as sensing, imaging, and communications systems. Correlators are a vital tool in comparing, contrasting, and ultimately processing signals. Current digital correlators are large, power-hungry systems that are the size of a briefcase. BAE Systems’ approach to developing analog correlators will maintain or improve performance while reducing the system to the size of a hockey puck.
“Smaller and more efficient systems improve size, weight, power, and costs to allow for full-spectrum signal processing closer to the edge, or onto platforms operating in denied airspace,” said Bryan Choi, Technology Development Director, BAE Systems’ FAST Labs. “This disruptive analog correlator technology can result in enhanced decision making, allow mission-critical technology to be deployed on smaller platforms, and create a new category of systems.”
As part of the program, BAE Systems seeks to deliver a radically more power-efficient analog correlator with high dynamic range and wide bandwidth. It will enable new capabilities including synthetic aperture radar image classification and image formation, automatic target recognition, passive coherent location, and jam-resistant communications in small form factor platforms.
