Mercury Systems, which continues to rapidly acquire new companies, is consolidating multiple West Coast facilities gained through acquisitions into an expanded manufacturing facility, according to its chief executive.
In an interview with Inside Defense this week, Mark Aslett said Mercury seeks to fully integrate its acquisitions.
"What's going on right now on the West Coast is that we did a number of acquisitions in the RF -- radio frequency -- technology domain," he said. The new facility, located in Oxnard, CA, will consolidate three smaller RF manufacturing locations.
"We're partway through that," Aslett added. "We expect to be complete in the first quarter of our fiscal year 2020," which runs from July through September.
The company already has an East Coast RF manufacturing and development facility in Hudson, NH, he said.
"My goal is to invest in the manufacturing assets to create scalable, state-of-the-art manufacturing locations as opposed to just having manufacturing assets that are smaller and spread out," Aslett said. "We've already gone from three locations down to two [in California] and then we've got one more facility move to occur."
Meanwhile, the company has completed three acquisitions this year: GECO Avionics, the Athena Group and Syntonic Microwave.
In January, Mercury picked up GECO, which focuses on avionics and mission computing.
In April, it added Athena and Syntonic. The acquisition of the Athena Group, Aslett said, was driven by Mercury's continued focus on providing domestically developed and produced technologies for military platforms. The Athena Group specializes in cryptographic and countermeasure IP used to secure defense computing systems.
Syntonic, Aslett said, provides a boost to the company's electronic warfare work. The company provides advanced synthesizers, wideband phase coherent tuners and microwave converters for signals intelligence and electronic intelligence applications. Aslett said Mercury is seeing significant growth in EW modernization.
Acquisitions are "an integral part of our business strategy," he told Inside Defense. "We've got a core competence inside of the company to be able to do multiple deals in parallel."