BETHESDA, Md. (States News Service) -- Nearly two years after it announced a deal to buy Comsat Corporation,
Lockheed Martin completed its purchase of the venerable satellite services company Thursday.
The deal received final approval from the Federal Communications Commission on Monday, ending a labyrinth of governmental approvals that Lockheed Martin had to receive after announcing the merger 24 months ago.
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Lockheed Martin also had to gain the
blessing of Congress before it could proceed with the $2.1 billion deal. That approval came in February.
Company officials said Thursday that they would not let the slow approval process affect the new company, which will be called
Lockheed Martin Global Telecommunications (LMGT).
"This newly combined company is doing nothing but leaning forward and looking to the future," said Charles Manor, LMGT's vice president of communications.
Chief executive officer John Sponyoe said that LMGT will concentrate on three key areas -- network services, satellite services and systems and technology -- that will bring it close to $1 billion in revenue annually.
Sponyoe said that the company expects solid returns in all three areas, but sees most of its growth coming in its network services and systems and technology divisions.
"The
satellite services business doesn't have quite the growth we see in network services," he said.
Lockheed Martin is actively seeking partners for its satellite
business and hopes to ink a deal within the next six months, Sponyoe told reporters.
"We have been working on this for some time," he said. "We are going to be working diligently to find partners."
Sponyoe said that LMGT would not make another deal on the scale of its acquisition of Comsat, but said that "there could be small acquisitions that become very, very significant to our long-term success."
LMGT will examine targets outside of the United States, focusing on what potential partners could bring to the new company.
"We're looking for
technology, we're looking for investors and we're looking for customers," Sponyoe said.
Indeed, foreign operations are among the new company's main priorities as it seeks to expand in the Latin American market and bolster its standing in countries like Turkey,
China, India and Russia.
"We think right now Latin America is probably the biggest opportunity for us," Sponyoe said, calling the region "the sweet spot we want to go after."
Though LMGT is a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, the aerospace giant plans an initial public offering of stock in the telecommunications venture within the next 18 months that would reduce its holding in LMGT to a minority stake.
The acquisition ends Comsat's 38-year history of quasi-government backing. The federal government created the company in 1962 in order to prevent American Telephone & Telegraph Corporation (AT&T), then a telephone monopoly, from extending its monopoly to the satellite communications sector.
Comsat became a publicly traded company the next year, but Congress ordered that no single investor could own a majority stake in the company because it was the only American firm with access to Intelsat, an international consortium of 19 satellites.
Congress eliminated Comsat's exclusive right to access Intelsat in February as part of the agreement that allowed Lockheed Martin to purchase the Bethesda, Maryland-based company.
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