Greg Hayes, chief executive officer of Raytheon Technologies, a Waltham-based company that’s one of the largest defense contractors in the country, says that this conflict will be good for business.
We are seeing, I would say, opportunities for international sales. We just have to look to last week where we saw the drone attack in the UAE, which have attacked some of their other facilities. And of course, the tensions in Eastern Europe, the tensions in the South China Sea, all of those things are putting pressure on some of the defense spending over there. So I fully expect we’re going to see some benefit from it.
I would say, though, that should should there be hostilities, whether it’s in the Middle East or whether it’s in the Asia-Pacific region you’re not going to see an immediate benefit here because what you’ll see is a reallocation of inventory that we already have out there with the services. But I fully expect we should see a recovery in the international defense spending and a book-to-bill well north of one as we move into 2022 and beyond. One of the biggest drivers, of course, will be LTAMs [Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor].
And I think again, that’s probably a 2023 benefit. We’ll start to see bookings then for LTAMs, which, of course, is the upgrade of the Patriot Missile Defense System, but that’ll be again a couple of years out.
As Hayes notes, there was a drone attack on three oil tankers and an airport extension in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates on January 17; the Houthi movement conducted it as a part of the Yemeni Civil War. The drone attack killed three civilians and injured six.
Hayes’s statement came in response to a question asking how Raytheon expected rising international tension to affect sales.
In the last 15 years, Russia has invaded nearby countries twice during Olympic Games. Russia invaded invaded and eventually annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014; the invasion began in the final few days of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics (which took place in Russia). It also invaded the country of Georgia during the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics.
The 2022 Winter Olympics in China is scheduled to begin Friday, February 4.
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