Colorado-born Ball Aerospace has a new owner, a new name and what the company hopes will be a growing global customer base. But Dave Kaufman, president of the company now called Space & Mission Systems, said the nearly 70-year-old business is “staying put” in Colorado.
BAE Systems PLC, a British arms, security and aerospace company, closed the $5.5 billion acquisition of Ball Aerospace from Ball Corp. on Friday, Feb. 16. Kaufman, previously Ball Aerospace president and a Ball Corp. senior vice president, removed a covering from the company’s new sign Tuesday. The red and white sign in the lobby of the aerospace company’s headquarters in Broomfield reads “BAE Systems.”
Despite all the changes, Kaufman said the company’s commitment to Colorado remains the same.
“We’re staying put. This has always been home for our sector,” Kaufman said.
The state’s aerospace economy is second only to California’s, he noted.
“We’ve invested billions of dollars in the facilities and the capabilities of the people in Colorado,” Kaufman said. “We’re absolutely staying in Colorado. This is where we have capabilities that maybe don’t exist anywhere else. Those will be critical for us going forward.”
The aerospace company started in 1956 as a partnership between Ball Corp., a global producer of aluminum packaging for beverages, and scientists at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Since then, the company has expanded to 5,200 employees and offices and manufacturing facilities in Boulder, Broomfield, Westminster and Colorado Springs.
“With this acquisition, we view it as a chance to increase that presence in Colorado and beyond,” Kaufman said to reporters.
Ball Corp. and BAE Systems announced the deal in August. Ball said in a statement last week that it will use roughly $2 billion of the after-tax proceeds to reduce net debt and another $2 billion for returns to shareholders through dividends and buybacks of stock.
Ball has said the sale will allow it to focus on growing the company’s global aluminum packaging businesses.
The sale allows BAE Systems and Space & Mission Systems to combine their capabilities and grow their space, security and defense work, Kaufman said. There is little overlap between the two companies’ expertise, he added.
“There’s no consolidation at work. We really see it as complementary capabilities,” said Kaufman.
The Colorado company has a storied history of space missions, an area that Kaufman said BAE Systems wants to strengthen. Ball Aerospace built seven of the instruments that were on the Hubble Space Telescope, which was launched in 1990. A telescope imaging spectrograph built by Ball allowed astronomers to confirm the existence of black holes.
Ball Aerospace employees built a 21-foot mirror system to capture light from objects for the James Webb Space Telescope, successor to Hubble. The Webb telescope is about 100 times more powerful than Hubble.
The aerospace company built the core instrument for the MethaneSAT mission that could launch next month. The Environmental Defense Fund is among the operators of the project, which will monitor methane emissions and identify the sources of the potent greenhouse gas.
Kaufman said when Ball Corp. was looking for potential buyers for its aerospace division, BAE Systems saw in Ball Aerospace a company in line with its strategy of growing its work in space. For the smaller business, being part of BAE Systems is an opportunity to tap into an international customer base. The British company operates in approximately 40 countries and has about 93,000 employees.
Before the sale, U.S.-based BAE Systems Inc., a subsidiary of the British company, had just a few employees in Colorado. Space & Mission Systems is a wholly owned subsidiary of BAE Systems Inc.
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