Lockheed signs pact with Tata to make F-16 planes in India

PARIS: Lockheed Martin signed an agreement with India’s Tata Advanced Systems to produce F-16 fighter planes in India, pressing ahead with a plan to shift its Fort Worth, Texas plant to win billions of dollars worth of order from the Indian military.

India’s air force needs hundreds of aircraft to replace its Soviet-era fleet, but Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has said foreign suppliers would have to make the planes in India with a local partner to help build a domestic industrial base and cut outright imports.

The agreement is an “intent to partner together to meet India’s Make-in-India requirement through the establishment of an F-16 production line in India,” Lockheed Martin’s leader of F16 business development, Phil Howard, said on Monday on the sidelines of the Paris Airshow.

But Modi’s Make-in-India drive runs the risk of conflicting with US President Donald Trump’s America First campaign under which he has been pressing for companies to invest in the United States and create jobs instead of setting up factories abroad.

However, Lockheed has met and briefed the current US administration on its plan, and Howard said he had a sense of full support from the Trump administration.

In announcing their agreement at the Paris Airshow, Lockheed and Tata said moving the production base to India would still retain jobs in the United States.

“F-16 production in India supports thousands of Lockheed Martin and F-16 supplier jobs in the US, creates new manufacturing jobs in India, and positions Indian industry at the center of the most extensive fighter aircraft supply ecosystem in the world,” a joint statement by the firms said. — Reuters