Leonardo’s UK presence key contributor to national economy
With Leonardo having a “fantastic presence” at this year’s Farnborough International Airshow, Aerospace Global News caught up with Clive James Higgins, chair and CEO, Leonardo UK, to learn more about the company’s significance to the UK.
“Leonardo contributes £2.5 billion to the UK economy and supports 30 thousand jobs across the UK – two thirds of which are supply chain jobs… so it really is a net contributor to GDP,” highlighted Higgins. Leonardo also invested £500 million in R&D alone last year, “which goes to show we’re generating the intellectual property and creating the export opportunities of the future,” he continued.
With around 900 young people on apprenticeships and graduate programmes – up 50% within the last few years” – Leonardo is also helping to stimulate the future workforce of tomorrow, something Higgins describes as “the life blood of the industry”.
As Leonardo moves into the final bidding stages of the UK Ministry of Defence’s New Medium Helicopter programme – with the company’s offering “a really compelling offer” – Leonardo is planning to build the AW145 at its facility in Yeovil, “the only facility that has a full end-to-end manufacturing, production, design and support capability” (supporting three thousand jobs directly for Leonardo and a further 12,500 in the supply chain).
With sustainability also a key consideration, Leonardo is the only company at a corporate level to be in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, a place it has held for over a decade. “We’re looking at plans to achieve net zero by 2030 and we’ve actually done 60% of that work already,” said Higgins. “The 40% to go was the difficult bit, but the investment over the coming years in the industrial plan will deliver that”.
