Black Country aerospace group Hampson Industries lands £18m jet deal
Black Country aerospace group Hampson Industries has landed an £18 million contract amidst signs that its previously frozen markets were beginning to thaw.
Hampson said yesterday it was unable to name the customer but disclosed the deal related to work on a new business jet being developed in North America.
It comes two months after Hampson, an international group based at Brierley Hill, said that delays in some major aircraft development projects were hampering its own efforts to combat the recession.
In a stock market update on August 19, the company cited delays with projects such as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, the Airbus A350 and the Lockheed F-35 strike fighter as holding up new orders for its aerospace tooling division.
Only days previously Hampson banked £23.7 million from the sale of its Birmingham-based Aerospace Machining Ltd subsidiary to Darwin Private Equity in line with its strategy of focusing on tooling, which accounts for nearly 60 per cent of revenue.
It said yesterday the new contract – for $28 million – was for the design and manufacture of precision tools for composite airframe structures.
The deal, which does not require additional capital expenditure, will start to contribute to revenue in the second half of the current financial year. The work will be carried out in the United States.
Chief executive Kim Ward said that, despite earlier delays, he was confident that a larger tooling order would soon filter through.
The coming months would see “several major new programmes reach design maturity and prepare for production”.
Speaking to the Birmingham Post from Florida yesterday, Mr Ward said that, with new orders beginning to come through, the downturn in revenue for the current year would not now be as much as predicted.
“It will not be Armageddon – closer to ten per cent rather than 15 per cent – and it will come back.”
Other recent wins for Hampson include an £18 million deal to supply tooling for a new executive jet to be built by Canadian company Bombardier.
Hampson passed another milestone earlier this year when it won the Birmingham Post Deal of the Year Award for its £158 million acquisition of US companies Odyssey Industries and Gobal Tooling Systems.
The company’s shares rose by six per cent to 81.5p in early trading yesterday before falling back to close at 79.5p, a three per cent gain that valued the FTSE Small Cap company at £126 million.
