Do you have any programs that you’re really
concerned about with the 2010 budget?
SMITH: There’s nothing in the 2010 budget that I
would say is a near-term impact to our business picture. The beauty of Raytheon is there is no program in
the entire company that really moves the needle in
terms of a stock market analyst acceptance. Most of
our biggest programs are 1 to 2 percent of sales.
The company was strategically set up, starting in
about 2000, with this vision of being platform agnostic. In other words, we just put stuff on these things.
We don’t buy them. We don’t build them. That’s not
what we do. We work inside the framework of whatever it is.
Where do you see good opportunities internationally for some of your systems?
SMITH: We actually have 1,500 [employees] in
Raytheon Australia. We’re the third largest defense
contractor in Australia now.
We also operate Raytheon Anschütz out of
Germany; it’s about 500 people. … It does a lot in commercial shipping — gyroscopes, navigation systems —
but it also is a key supplier to the German submarine
program.
We have been in Saudi Arabia, I believe, 43 years.
We are fully engaged in assisting the Saudis through
what they call their Saudi Naval Modernization
Program for their eastern fleet.
Then there’s some work we’re doing in Japan, probably starting out in the mine warfare world. They’re
very interested in AQS- 20 [mine-hunting sonar], in
particular.
We’re the resident big dog on FFG 7s [guided-missile
frigates] around the world. The United States still has
30, I think, and a couple of decommissioned ones, but
we’ve transferred [ 18] FFG 7s around the world. The
FFG 7 comes with a whole bunch of Raytheon equipment on it. We worked five or six years ago with the
Turks on their FFG 7s to help them create a Turkish
combat system.
In the international torpedo world, we obviously
have a great relationship with the Aussies, but Brazil
has bought the Mk48 heavyweight torpedo and I think
the Mk54 [lightweight torpedo], as they now start full-rate production, will be a big seller on the international market as well as we go forward.
How about other business opportunities here?
SMI TH: Let me start with homeland security. We just got
our Certificate of Acceptance for a port-management
system up in Providence, R.I. That same system is being
used in multiple places along the southwest border, not
on water. It has deployed several places overseas. It’s a
86
LISA NIPP
situational awareness system. Just recently, a customer
wanted a classified side to it.
Because we’re a sensors kind of company, three and
a half years ago we bid on the Advanced Spectroscopic
Portal, which is the nuclear radiation detector for the
ports and the entryways into the United States. The
product we built is doing extremely well in tests. We
have several of them sitting on the factory floor waiting for somebody to make a decision to deploy them.
Here are some exciting things we’ve done in the last
year to 18 months.
We have sold a license to use RF [radio frequency]
energy to, in a green way, extract oil shale to produce oil.
We’ve partnered with Schlumberger [Ltd., principal
offices in Paris, Houston and The Hague], and
Schlumberger has taken the technology out to the fields
and has started the process of field testing the technology.
The next thing we’ve done is we’ve taken small RF
energy devices and demonstrated twice now that we
can, in a green way, using much less energy and causing much less damage to Mother Earth, protect fruit
orchards from frost in northern California. We’re in the
process of licensing this technology out to big co-op
type agricultural [concerns]. ■
SEAPOWER / MAY 2009
