New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
‘Its ability to integrate any type of platform’
CT native tasked with leading the finances of nation’s largest defense conglomerate
Ask Jay Malave what emerging technology fascinates him the most at Lockheed Martin, and he skips over what might be top of mind for many others: the Defiant-X helicopters under development at Sikorsky in Stratford, hypersonic missiles designed to fly at five times the speed of sound, or lasers to take out enemy targets.
For Lockheed Martin's new CFO, it is the new communications systems that are improving the ability of all military units and branches to work in concert — and in the Connecticut native's new role as chief financial officer of the nation's largest defense contractor and its myriad businesses, it is something he can relate to.
“What I admire most about Lockheed Martin is its ability to integrate any type of platform — whether it's space, whether it's aero, whether it's seaborne vessels, whether it's missiles or integrated air defense,” Malave told CTInsider in an interview this month.
“You would think intuitively that an F-22 aircraft and an F-35 aircraft were born to communicate with each other. They weren't — each of them has their own data link systems, their own communications systems that are unique.”
Malave is as familiar with the F-22 and F-35 about as much as anyone without an engineering degree, having spent the initial stretch of his career at Pratt & Whitney in East Hartford and Middletown, which supplies engines for both fighter jets. Lockheed Martin hired Malave as CFO in February under CEO Jim Taiclet, replacing John Mollard, who had held the CFO role on an interim basis since August 2021.
Lockheed Martin is the largest U.S. defense contractor, with Bloomberg estimating its contractual obligations at just over $40 billion this past summer, nearly as much as the next two biggest combined in Boeing and Raytheon Technologies.
Massachusetts-based Raytheon jumped up the list in 2020 with the acquisition of Connecticut-based United Technologies, whose subsidiaries include Pratt & Whitney in East Hartford, where Malave began his career.
Malave said he and everyone else at Lockheed Martin are well aware of the stakes facing the U.S. military, which is shifting from the Afghanistan conflict to the threat of any wider European conflict as Russia continues hostilities in Ukraine. At the same time, China continues to modernize and expand its navy after months of rattling the saber over Taiwan.
“We've gone from an environment where we've had domain superiority pretty easily when you talk about at least the last 20 years, to now pivoting to a potential domain environment where your superiority is not taken for granted and is not a given,” Malave said.
“We thought we were going to be looking at flat defense budgets both domestically and internationally — the environment has changed substantially.”
Lockheed Martin is counting on Malave to make the numbers add up as the conglomerate grapples with higher costs as a result of overall
inflation, even as government watchdogs scrutinize the books of all defense companies in an effort to adhere to budgets.
Malave came from a modest background, his parents both coming to the United States in their early teens from Puerto Rico. His father drove a garbage truck in Hartford before eventually moving the family to Newington, where he became a U.S. Postal Service carrier and then a supervisor.
Malave's mother worked as a nutritionist at New Britain General Hospital, which today is part of Hartford HealthCare as The Hospital of Central Connecticut.
“Newington was a great town to grow up in — it was just a small town, everyone knew each other and it was a mix of blue-collar and whitecollar,” Malave said. “You got a sense of diversity.”
Malave graduated from Newington High School in 1986 and enrolled in the University of Connecticut, starting off with engineering before switching to a math major that pushed his graduation back to 1991.
He and spouse Janine met the summer after graduating as she pursued a career in education that would eventually land her as a teacher and department head at Maloney High School in Meriden. They married in 1994 in Windsor, where she grew up.
The 1991 job market was a tough one for new graduates, but Malave hooked onto a Hartford job with the U.S. Department of Labor as an investigator of cases filed under the Equal Employment Opportunity Act.
“That was a great job because I got to see a lot of different companies, a lot of different things that we do in the state,” Malave said.
“Anything from universities to hospitals to manufacturers like a Pratt & Whitney or Sikorsky, Hamilton Standard at the time, Electric Boat — I was visiting those but also insurance companies and all these different types of companies that you wouldn't normally associate with having federal contracts.
“It gave me the opportunity to just really learn about industry, learn about what I might be interested in long term.”
After five years on the job, he pegged accounting as a career path and got a graduate degree from the University of Hartford. He had accepted a job with Ernst & Young, but came onto the radar of United Technologies, which owned Pratt & Whitney, Sikorsky and Hamilton Standard at the time as well as Carrier and Otis.
Malave said UTC was persistent after observing his work with DOL, offering him a human resources job but with opportunities to transition to accounting or finance after a year. Pratt & Whitney stepped up quickly with such an offer, an entry-level job tracking expenses and cash that Malave recollects no one else wanted.
But it gave him a grounding in all aspects of the business, as did his next job in financial corporate planning, as part of a group that was notorious for burning out its staff.
“I was intellectually curious and I said, ‘I'll do it — why not?' ” Malave said. “I loved it — I got to learn so much more about the company. In financial planning you see everything that's going on . ... That's where my career really took off.”
It was a key period for Pratt & Whitney under Louis Chenevert, who would eventually be promoted to CEO of UTC. Pratt & Whitney was making its initial foray into geared turbo-fan jet engines that offer airlines far better fuel efficiency than existing engines at the time it was producing along with rivals GE Aviation and Rolls-Royce.
“Given the stakes, this was the future of Pratt — it was do or die as far as Pratt's market share,” Malave said.
When UTC reached a $16.5 billion deal to acquire Goodrich, it assigned Malave to the financial integration team, his first dive into merger work. He got the attention of Greg Hayes, who had replaced Chenevert as CEO of UTC, and Malave was elevated to chief financial officer of UTC Aerospace Systems.
Harris Corp. came calling as it was finalizing its own merger with L3 Communications to create L3Harris, which specializes in land, air and space-based communications for the military. The company offered Malave the CFO position under Bill Brown, who had once led UTC Fire & Security, which he accepted.
But Lockheed Martin was also interested in Malave, with a recruiter dangling the CFO job under Taiclet, who joined the company in 2020 as the replacement for the retired Marillyn Hewson who had led Lockheed Martin since 2013. Under Hewson, Lockheed Martin acquired Sikorsky from UTC in 2016.
Malave has since been making the rounds of Sikorsky and other Lockheed Martin business units, to take a deeper dive into the systems they make and the challenges they face during the ongoing pressures on suppliers as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and runaway inflation.
One silver lining for smaller suppliers to Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and other major contractors — count Malave among those who believe more components will be made stateside after all the shipping headaches of the past 18 months.