Raytheon to Fight Cyberattacks - Analyst Blog

Raytheon Co.’s (RTN) wholly owned subsidiary Raytheon BBN Technologies has been awarded a $2.9 million contract by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory to develop new approaches to protect the Department of Defense Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) against cyberattacks.
 
Military information systems are increasingly dependent on SOA, which is called upon to support complex military tasks and missions. The advanced security features that Raytheon BBN Technologies will develop under the Advanced Protected Services (APS) program will handle the multifaceted and dynamic information exchange demanded by network-centric operations more quickly and cost effectively.
 
The APS program aims at enabling future military service-oriented information systems to detect, protect and adapt to surviving attacks from motivated, well-resourced and determined enemies.
 
Raytheon BBN Technologies is a research and development organization with expertise in information security, speech and language processing, networking, distributed systems, and sensing and control systems.
 
Raytheon is the one of the largest aerospace and defense companies in the U.S. It provides state-of-the-art electronics, mission systems integration and other capabilities in the areas of sensing; effects; and command, control, communications and intelligence systems, as well as a broad range of mission support services.
 
Raytheon is scheduled to report its fiscal 2009 fourth quarter results on Jan 28, 2010. The company expects fiscal 2009 revenues in the range of $24.7 billion to $25 billion. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for the quarter is currently $1.24 per share. For the current fiscal year, the average forecast is $4.83 per share, up 18.7% from last year.
 
We continue to view Raytheon as one of the best positioned among the large-cap defense primes due to its non-platform-centric focus, strong order bookings and order backlog, strong cash flow generation, and focus on shareholder value. We maintain our market Neutral recommendation on the shares. Defense contractors with significant exposure to high-cost platform programs include Lockheed Martin Corp. (LMT), Northrop Grumman Corp. (NOC) and General Dynamics Corp. (GD).
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