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Saturday July 21, 2012

Eurofighter consortium ready to invest RM6.3bil in Malaysia


LONDON: Eurofighter consortium, lead by BAE Systems, is ready to invest RM6.3bil in offset programmes designed specifically for Malaysia within the next five years.

BAE Systems' senior industrial partnerships and offset manager, Mike Perret, said the group had collectively invested RM3.5bil over the last five years in Malaysia.

“We have been talking to our European partner companies involved in the Eurofighter Typhoon and that's the level of investment that they already and are planning to undertake.

“Together with our European partners, we're looking at delivering significant value not only original equipment manufacturer partners, but also supply chains down to SMEs. We have the financial and technical capability to deliver,” Perret said at BAE Systems' facilities in Warton, about 400km from here.

He said the group was looking at the best long-term offset projects with genuine technologies, not only on a national basis, but also regionally, thus providing access for Malaysian companies to move into global growth.

Primarily most of the projects are in the manufacturing sector but the global defence, aerospace and security company will like to move away from traditional manufacturing into areas such as avionics and green technologies.

Perret said Malaysia had moved into different industrial relations particularly in its offset requirements.

“In the past offset used to be around what we called build to print' projects. You set up a factory, produce an item and sell it at market place. Generally those programmes have been short-lived and difficult to sustain. That's more in the past.

“The growth that Malaysia is looking for now is in terms of per capita growth which is more likely to come out of the transfers of capabilities and technologies. We are now focusing our offset programmes in industrial partnering in areas around technologies and working at how we might exploit them,” he said.

Citing an example, Perret said BAE Systems had an advanced technology centre in UK with about 450 engineers working predominantly on Blue Skies Technologies.

“We take the technologies that we developed and apply them to our business in terms of aerospace and defence but many of those technologies have the potential spin-off that isn't aerospace or defence and could be exploited but we don't exploit them because it's not our core business,” he added.

Perret said BAE Systems was prepared to share the intellectual property rights that it developed with companies that could exploit the technologies in areas outside technologies and defence.

The group is also looking at opportunities to provide technology that is not only for Malaysia's requirement but making the country the central focal point for expansion in the Asean region. Bernama

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