Monday September 20, 2010

Lockheed Martin lays off 600 senior executives

channelnewsasia.com :

Lockheed Martin announced that more than 600 company executives have taken up early retirement offers as the defence contractor undergoes a massive cost-cutting restructuring. The layoffs, representing one quarter of Lockheed Martin's senior management, are part of the company's plan to cut back about 10,000 employees across the United States since the start of the year. The buyout offers are the latest in a series of initiatives aimed at "enhancing performance and lowering costs to keep pace with evolving customer realities and global security challenges." Lockheed Martin employs about 136,000 people worldwide and is engaged in development and manufacturing advanced weapon systems.

- Though this might sound more like a rounding error in the rarefied atmosphere that Lockheed Martin resides, where top-line revenue figures are well over the $40 billion range, this cost-cutting measure would probably be pretty significant in terms of the impact that it would have on the rest of the organization, and in terms of how it would be perceived by the rest of the world going forward. A quarter of senior management effectively being told, "thank you very much, here's the door" speaks volumes as to the kind of changes that are occurring in the US military-industrial complex.

Okay, now that some people have asked (again), besides the obvious macro-economic factors (or obvious to those who've been keeping track), here's some further information on how and why I decided to get out early, long before all this happened, which was all of two years back :

1. The company newsletter started to sound just a little bit too self-congratulatory (20,000th Hellfire missile delivered!). Not to take it too personally, but to me it sounded like they were celebrating it like it was a high-volume product, instead of saying they had a revolutionary new way of tracking and hunting down, say, tanks. Where exactly may I ask, is the edge in producing missiles in volume?

2. The halo around the Stealth Fighter mythos shining just a little bit less brightly, with the retirement of the original F-117 Nighthawk, and the F-22 Raptor ending up mired in problems, and ultimately being cancelled. That, and the end of the SR-71 Blackbird era with nothing viable in sight other than tin-foil hat brigade rumours of an Aurora super project that was supposed to be a black triangular UFO that could go Mach 5, stop, and turn on a dime. That would run on exotic fuel that doesn't exist. Yes, and that would take some photos as it went about being too invisible, too fast, and too maneuverable to catch. Nope, naturally I didn't quite buy that story.

3. The Democrats starting to win just a bit more in elections than they've been doing in the Republican years under the Bush family. It was mostly this last one, actually. The first was just a hunch, the second pointed at problems in the big aerospace division but did not detract at all from the information systems division I was in. But this last one, welllll ... that was political. That was different. That was it.

See also :

1. Lockheed Martin
2. Boeing to shut down production of C-17 cargo plane
3. Defense spending cuts could kill Lockheed F-22, Boeing FCS and other weapons programs
4. US defense industry girding for predicted slump

(2010-09-20 22:27:45 SGT) [Biz] Permalink

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