JFD Acquires Defence Consulting Europe

James Fisher Defence (JFD), a global subsea operations and engineering company, today announced the acquisition of Defence Consulting Europe AB (DCE) for an initial consideration of £3.7m for the intellectual property and the entire share capital of DCE. Further consideration of up to £1.9m is payable contingent on certain turnover and profit targets for the period until June 2016.

DCE, based in Sweden, designs and manufactures Swimmer Delivery Vehicles (SDVs) for covert operations. The acquisition further strengthens JFD’s Special Operations customer offering, as well as expanding its range of SDV products and solutions the company provides to markets including special forces, law enforcement, counter-terrorism, maritime protection and mine countermeasures. As part of the acquisition, DCE will adopt the JFD brand name, operating as James Fisher Defence Sweden.

“This acquisition is a significant move for JFD and enables us to offer our customers a broader range of vehicles to suit a variety of mission types and deployment methods. Sweden is renowned for the quality and practicality of its maritime engineering and DCE brings with it a proven range of products and designs which complement those that exist within JFD,” said Ben Sharples, Managing Director, James Fisher Defence.

“We are seeing significant interest in navies looking to develop specific maritime skills for special forces, counter-terrorism and other areas of covert operations. This acquisition will allow customers to benefit from our combined subsea engineering experience, safety pedigree and global support network.”

JFD and DCE recently launched a new range of SDVs called The SEAL Pod; surface or sub-sea craft, which can be optimized for a particular deployment method or mission profile and can be provided in a number of configurations:

• SEAL Carrier’s; surface and subsurface vehicle operating at speeds greater than 30 kts delivered by surface ship or air-dropped.
• Sub SEAL’s; wet or dry submersibles delivered from or via an attachment to the casing of a submarine, by ship davit or by helicopter
• Torpedo SEAL’s; small, highly flexible wet submersibles capable of extending diver deployment range.

Frederik Hillelson, Managing Director, JFD Sweden, said, “Being part of JFD provides us with the necessary resource and scale to support the demand we have seen for our products in this exciting market. Our ambition is to use this, whilst maintaining DCE’s engineering focus and pedigree to leverage our range of market leading SDV products to provide customers with unrivalled, best-in-class solutions.”

jfdefence.com