Private Equity’s donor of one of the oldest British industrial manufacturing groups is in talks to sell an advanced defense technology company that will dismantle their parents.
Sky News learned that Advent International, the buyout company that bought Cobham for 4 billion pounds sterling in 2020, then plunged Ultra Electronics listed in London in an agreement of 2.6 billion pounds sterling the following year, is in detailed negotiations to unload the Ultra Electronic Warfare (EWST) simulation technology.
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The division offers “training and performance validation capacities” to its customers and, according to the company-“specializes in multi-spectral and countermeasures threat simulators that are designed to strengthen the naval, Air Force, the Army and the Defense and the Defense Industry Electronic War, Evaluation and Training Test ”.
A tenderer who explored an offer at an earlier stage of the sales process said on Friday that the company EWST was unlikely to order a large price.
A change in control may nevertheless require approval under the government’s national security and investment law, taking into account the nature of the operations of the division.
The EWST division is part of Ultra Intelligence & Communications, which is itself a larger group subsidiary.
Alvarez & Marsal, the professional service company, was written to manage the auction, added the source.
Advent supervised a wholesale rupture of the Enlarge Cobham group – a controversial process that attracted the opposition of members of the founding family of the company as well as politicians and commentators.
Among the assets already sold, there were aerospace communications from Cobham, based in Paris, the French group Thales, which brought in 850 million pounds sterling in 2023.
The Advent spokesman did not respond to requests for information on the remaining elements of the Cobham origin company in his property, but refused to comment on the EWST sales process.