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Being four years into a three-year business plan is just fine with Mason Holland.
Holland, the CEO of Eclipse Aerospace, the reborn jet manufacturer, spoke to the Economic Forum on Wednesday at the Hotel Albuquerque about the company’s slow-and-steady approach to growth.
“We’re four years into a three-year plan, and that’s OK,” Holland said. “We could throttle our growth to the growth of the economy.”
When Eclipse Aerospace started on Sept. 4, 2009, he said, it had three goals: to service Eclipse’s existing planes, to update the existing planes and to produce new planes.
Predecessor Eclipse Aviation had sold 260 Eclipse 500 jets, at a cost of about $1.2 million. That meant, Holland said, that customers had nearly $300 million of assets in the air, all of which needed servicing.
“It could be a nice little service business. But I don’t like nice little service businesses,” he said.
So he started a “completion program” that, for about $300,000, sold upgrades to 200 of the existing planes. The upgrades added important features to the Eclipse 500, such as GPS navigation and a de-icing system.
“It was educational as we worked toward our third goal, returning the aircraft to production,” Holland said. “We’re very close to our third goal.”
The company will be delivering its first Eclipse 550 jet in Las Vegas next month, and then two more per month for the rest of the year.
Though Eclipse Aviation had big plans to sell about 1,000 planes annually at roughly $1 million each, the new company has much more realistic goals.
“There are 2.7 billion people in the world. Forty of them want an Eclipse,” Holland said.
WASHINGTON | Sat Sep 21, 2013 12:39am EDT
(Reuters) – The Pentagon said on Friday it had finalized a contract worth nearly $4 billion with Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N) to supply additional missile defense equipment to the United States and the United Arab Emirates.
The deal involves Lockheed’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system that is designed to intercept ballistic missiles in midair, according to the Pentagon’s daily digest of major weapons contracts.
The contract reflects growing confidence and demand for the missile defense system, said Riki Ellison, founder of the non-profit Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance.
The deal, which has been in negotiation for several years, will combine orders for the United States and UAE, generating savings for the United States of about 10 percent, said Mat Joyce, Lockheed vice president and THAAD program manager.
It includes 192 interceptors for the UAE and up to 110 interceptors for the U.S. Army, including an option for fiscal 2014 that is valued at $352 million, to be exercised no later than December 31, according to the Pentagon announcement.
Joyce said the option would allow the U.S. government to benefit from the lower pricing at a time when it is facing likely additional reductions in the U.S. defense budget.
The United States is in talks with Qatar on a possible sale of the THAAD missile defense system.
Saudi Arabia, Japan and South Korea have also expressed interest, Joyce said.
The U.S. Missile Defense Agency last week conducted the first operational test of the THAAD system and its ability to work together with the Aegis combat system on a guided-missile destroyer. Working together, the two systems intercepted two medium-range ballistic missile that were fired nearly simultaneously.
Earlier this year, after North Korea threatened to launch a nuclear attack on the United States, the Pentagon moved two Aegis destroyers to the western Pacific and a THAAD missile system to its Pacific territory of Guam.
(Reporting by Patrick Rucker and Andrea Shala-Esa; Editing by Eric Beech and Ron Popeski)
GlenDee / MGI 