Justice Department Requires CPI to Divest Antenna Business to Complete Acquisition

5.6m ASC Signal Ka-band Antenna. Photo: CPI

The U.S. Justice Department on Thursday said that it is requiring Communications and Power Industries LLC (CPI) to divest its ASC Signal Division for the company to proceed with its planned acquisition of the satellite communications technologies business of General Dynamics.

CPI’s deal for General Dynamics SATCOM Technologies was announced last August and was expected to close during 2019. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed at the time but Justice Department documents say that the agreed purchase price is $175 million.

The Justice Department said that without CPI’s divestiture of ASC Signal, there would be “substantially” less competition for large geostationary satellite antennas in the U.S. It says that the two companies are the only two “significant” domestic suppliers of the large antennas and that the U.S. Defense Department and other customers “prefer to avoid having foreign suppliers for components in the transmission chain for sensitive national security-related information.”

As structured, the deal would give CPI a monopoly on the antennas in the U.S., Justice Department said.

“The merger, as originally structured, would have eliminated competition for large geostationary satellite antennas, an essential component of government, military, and commercial satellite communication networks,” Makan Delrahim, assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, said in a statement. “Today’s settlement will ensure that the Department of Defense and other purchasers of large geostationary satellite antennas continue to benefit from vigorous competition in the design, manufacture, and sale of these products.”

A spokeswoman for CPI told Defense Daily that the company “is taking the necessary steps to close expeditiously” on the acquisition of GD SATCOM Technologies.

CPI had $500 million in sales in 2019 and GD’s SATCOM Technologies had between $200 million and $300 million in revenue last year. CPI is a portfolio company of Odyssey Investment Partners.

This article was first published by our sister publication Defense Daily.