Lockheed Martin

From ArticleWorld

Lockheed Martin is a leading aerospace and defence technology manufacturer which came into existence in 1995 by the merger of companies Lockheed Corporation and Martin Marietta. With a management headed by President-CEO Robert J. Stevens, the company is administered from Bethesda, Maryland in the United States. Lockheed Martin has over 135,000 employees across the globe.

Lockheed Martin draws most of its revenues from sales to the US Department of Defence. The company has foreign military customers as well.

History

Lockheed Martin attributes its origins to three aviation greats: Glenn Martin and brothers Allan and Malcolm Loughead. It was in 1909 in the state of California that Martin flew his first silk-and-bamboo plane and cherished dreams of owning an aircraft company. Just three years later, he established the Glenn L. Martin Company and in 1914, delivered the first aircraft, the Model TT Trainer to the US Army Signal Corps. A twin-engine bomber called the MB-2 was sold to the US air force in 1918. The company continued to manufacture both passenger and military aircraft and saw steady progress. Later, in the decades following the 1950s, the company increasingly concentrated on weapons technology rather than aircraft.

In 1961, Martin Marietta was formed as a result of a merger with construction-materials-supplier called the American-Marietta. The new company survived a takeover bid from Bendix Corporation and recovered from staggering debts around the year 1982. After acquiring the aerospace business of General Electric the company almost doubled in size.

The Loughead brothers too had humble beginnings. In 1926, about 13 years after they had flown their first wood-and-fabric seaplane over San Francisco, they founded the Lockheed Aircraft Company in Hollywood, California. The company shot to fame in 1931 when Wiley Post flew a Lockheed Vega around the world in record time. The firm contributed important fighter planes during the Second World War. Lockheed continued to produce spy planes, ballistic missiles and spacecraft till the late 1980s when it decided to move into commercial aerospace manufacturing.

Recent developments

After the end of the Cold War, both Lockheed and Martin Marietta began to look for major changes in strategies. Finally in 1995, the United States government, projecting long term interests for the country’s defence, approved a merger of the two companies. The following year, the newly-formed Lockheed Martin emerged as the leading defence contractor after acquiring a large portion of the assets of Loral Corporation, a defence-electronics company. The company also made an offer to buy Northrop Grumman Corporation, the maker of the deadly B-2 Stealth bomber. However, the U.S. Department of Justice prevented this on the grounds that Lockheed Martin would breach antitrust laws in the process.