COM DEV International, a Waterloo Region-based aerospace components company founded 41 years ago, has announced plans to be acquired by New Jersey-based conglomerate Honeywell International.
Honeywell, a Fortune 100 company whose 2014 revenue topped $40 billion US, will pay $455 million in the deal, which won’t be finalized until early January 2016, when COM DEV’s shareholders will vote on it.
“They are buying this company as a growth opportunity,” said Mike Pley, COM DEV’s President, who added, “They’re in Canada for the long haul.”
The Cambridge-based space hardware manufacturer, whose components are found in 80 per cent of the world’s commercial communications satellites, served as a foundational pillar of Waterloo Region’s tech community.
COM DEV will report into Honeywell’s Space Systems division, of which Pley said, “There is very little overlap in what they’re doing and what we’re doing.”
More recently, COM DEV launched exactEarth, which tracks global shipping traffic with its satellite constellation, in 2009.
“Under this transaction, exactEarth will be spun out and become a public company,” said Peter Mabson, President of exactEarth. “This is great for us and meets all the objectives that we have for the next phase of our growth.”
This isn’t the first attempt at an exactEarth IPO. Earlier this year, the company started moving to go public, but poor market conditions forced plans to be put on hold.
As it is spun out, $20 million will be injected into exactEarth for it to continue its growth, which has seen the team go from three to 66 in five years.
“We launched another one of our satellites last month,” Mabson said, adding that another 60 satellite payloads are now being developed for deployment over the next few years.
Mabson expects the team to grow as it builds out more software applications from the data exactEarth’s satellites are collecting high above us.
Aside from the potential for more jobs, Pley noted what this means for the community.
“Typically, (Honeywell) have a pretty strong community presence wherever they operate, which bodes well for Cambridge and Waterloo Region,” he said.
Photo: Satellite in Space by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
