British aero engineer Hampson Industries has won its largest ever tooling contract, worth $53 million (£34 million).
The contract is to design and manufacture lightweight mandrel tools for carbon fibre lay-up for a major commercial aerospace programme.
Although the West Midlands-based company did not name the customer, it is widely believed to be Boeing, the world's second largest commercial plane maker.
The value of the contract is expected to be realised over a 12-month period effective immediately, and is not anticipated to require significant capital investment.
Work will be undertaken at Hampson’s California-based Coast Composites and Composites Horizons facilities, as well as at Detroit-based Odyssey Industries.
Commenting on the deal, Hampson’s chairman, Chris Geoghegan, said: “We are delighted to have secured this high value tooling contract after some months of delays in the conversion of our strong quote pipeline into firm orders.
“This is the second significant contract signed in recent weeks following on from the US$10 million (£6.5 million) contract received in August. This latest win reflects Hampson’s unique ability, as market leader, to provide a fully-integrated, one-stop technology solution in light-weight, precision tooling.”
He concluded: “This contract follows many months of outstanding work by our people against a challenging market backdrop. It attests to the strength and depth of our technical capabilities in advanced composite materials and our ability to offer our global customers a unique value proposition using the latest available material and tooling technology.”
The contract will come as a welcome boost to the company, whose tooling business has been suffering from delays at a number of aircraft programmes, such as Bombardier’s Lear 85 and Boeing's 787.
Hampson designs and manufactures close tolerance tooling and assembly systems for composite and metallic aero structures. It serves the global commercial and military aerospace markets from manufacturing facilities in the UK, North America and India.
The company employs approximately 1,400 people worldwide.
