News: Lockheed Martin consolidates with new Canberra HQ | ADM August 2012

Lockheed Martin’s new Centennial House, officially opened last month by ACT Chief Minister Katy Gallagher and Christopher Kubasik, the company’s current Vice Chairman, President and Chief Operating Officer, consolidates the majority of its Canberra staff into a single facility.

Kubasik will assume the role of Lockheed Martin’s Chief Executive Officer from 1 January next year. He takes over from long-serving Chairman and CEO Robert Stevens and will be succeeded by the Executive Vice President of Lockheed Martin’s Electronic Systems business, Marilyn Hewson.

Already housing a cutting-edge cyber security facility, known as the NextGen Cyber Innovation and Technology Centre, Centennial House will bring together 200 Lockheed Martin employees, making it the sixth largest employer in Canberra outside of the Federal Government.

While the company’s Australian workforce has seen significant growth, with its current 750-strong workforce, this consolidation is focused on affordability, efficiency and commonality.

During a media roundtable, Kubasik explained that the company as a whole had gone from 146,000 staff to its current level of 123,000 globally, with close to 10,000 redundancies over the last two and a half years. Lockheed Martin’s workforce was further reduced by 5,000 when it sold two of its business entities.

Kubasik said redundancies were unfortunate, but the company had kept staff informed and always initiates a voluntary redundancy program before forced redundancies. They generally fill 60 per cent of the redundancies through this mechanism. The company also had a voluntary executive separation program in recent times, which reduced about 26 per cent of its senior employees.

Acknowledging that it was a global and competitive market, Kubasik explained that people were the largest driver of costs, with facilities the second.

“We’ve closed about two million square feet of facilities over the last couple of years … and we have a plan for another couple of million square feet as a way to try to remain cost competitive,” he said.

Kubasik also spoke about sequestration - the automatic spending cuts in the US that would require an additional $US600 billion reduction in Defense spending over the next 10 years if Congress does not reach a deal on the budget.