Top U.K. Defense Associations Set To Merge

LONDON - Britain's top aerospace and defense trade associations are to merge following final approvals from the members of both organizations in the last few days.
The Society of British Aerospace Companies (SBAC) and the Defence Manufacturers Association (DMA) announced June 10 they are set to form an as-yet-unnamed trade organization in October.
The new association will represent around 800 companies in the defense, civil aviation, space and homeland security industries. Rees Ward, director general of the DMA, is set to become chief executive of the merged organization; Ian Godden, the SBAC chief executive, is chairman-designate.
News of the merger came the same day as the SBAC released performance figures for the British aerospace industry for 2008, showing overall sales were flat at 20.57 billion pounds ($33.7 billion).
The SBAC survey said, however, that with the pound down substantially against the U.S. dollar and the euro, they would have expected "a more substantial gain in turnover."
There was further bad news on orders and employment for the aerospace sector.
The SBAC reported a 23 percent slump in orders to 35 billion pounds last year and an 11 percent drop in employment numbers across the defense and civil aerospace sectors.
In the defense sector three performance figures stood out.
Domestic sales in defense fell 13.2 percent while exports headed in the opposite direction with a 21 percent rise during the year.
On June 9, the United Kingdom Trade & Investment's Defence and Security Organisation, Britain's government-run export sales operation, issued figures for 2008 showing that the air sector accounted for about three quarters of the 4.2 billion pounds overseas sales total last year.
Potentially the most worrying figure from the SBAC survey was that research and development spending by defense companies in the U.K. plummeted by 30 percent.
The SBAC cautioned that a good chunk of the fall was represented by a number of large defense programs moving out of their research and development phase.
A spokesman for the trade body said figures in research and development were volatile and officials would have to see whether the downturn was replicated in future years before drawing any conclusions. Godden said the figures on aerospace performance would come as no surprise in the current economic climate: "There has been a slowdown in the sector but compared to the rest of the economy, aerospace has held up well thus far. Our industry is in for a difficult period in the immediate future, but the degree of that difficulty is yet to become clear.
"Of particular concern is the decline in the domestic market for civil and defense products as well as the large fall in R&D spending and employment," Godden said. "One year's results do not make a trend, but the danger to the future of what is a successful manufacturing and engineering industry for the U.K. from this fall in investment is all too obvious. In partnership with the government, we will have to address this urgently, despite the current pressure on budgets, to maintain our position as the second-largest nation in the global aerospace industry behind the USA."