Mercury hires chief transformation officer

Mercury Systems has hired former Boston Consulting Group managing director Thomas Huber as executive vice president and chief transformation officer, the aerospace-and-defense technology company said Tuesday.

Huber officially joined Mercury on Tuesday and will oversee its “1MPACT” organizational restructuring initiative as the company expects to hit $1 billion in annual revenue for its new fiscal year started July 3.

CEO Mark Aslett said in a release that Thomas will focus on these six areas under the umbrella of 1MPACT: organizational efficiency and scalability, procurement and supply chain optimization, facilities optimization, research-and-development investment efficiency, capital and asset efficiency, and scalable common processes and systems.

Andover, Massachusetts-headquartered Mercury reported $924 million in revenue for its most recent and just-ended 2020 fiscal year, which the company stated as 5-percent organic sales growth over FY 2019 figures.

The bottom line improved by 15 percent year-over-year to $201.9 million in adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization), a number that represents 21.9 percent of revenue.

During Mercury’s fourth quarter earnings call Aug. 3, Aslett told investors the 1MPACT effort intends to build upon the company’s current strategy dating back to its 2014 fiscal year and characterized it as not unlike some of the market’s larger players.

“A way to think about this and to use an analogy, two of our large customers that recently merged with other defense primes are going through similar value creation programs,” Aslett said.

“We've effectively acquired a company greater than two times our size over the course of the past seven years. It just so happens that we've done so via 13 acquisitions as compared with a single merger of equals like our customers.”