Has Amentum Become Sector’s ‘Biggest Provider’ of Engineering & Tech?

Advanced engineering and technology company Amentum over the last year merged with two Jacobs businesses to form what Raymond James Equity Capital Markets Managing Director Brian Gesuale calls the “biggest solutions provider in this space, if you look at scale against all the peers in the public markets.” This dominance is achieved, Gesuale and Amentum CEO John Heller discussed, through a large, diversified portfolio of offerings that spans five core markets: energy and environment, defense, space, intelligence and civil.

Gesuale and Heller spoke onstage at the 2024 Raymond James Defense and Government Conference on Thursday for a fireside chat that allowed Heller to introduce a reinvigorated, stronger-than-ever enterprise. He particularly highlighted the space, intelligence and environment lines of effort as crucial to the organization’s success.

GovCon companies like Amentum are critical contributors to the protection of U.S. national security. Industry’s role in helping the government realize such goals will be the main topic at Potomac Officers Club’s next big event: the 2024 Homeland Security Summit, where top leaders from DHS, CISA and more will provide their insights on progress made and what’s still to be done.

Amentum’s Space Pursuits

“We think about space now as the new domain, and arguably with China as a near-peer adversary, probably the most important domain … the space economy between now and 2035—10 years—is estimated to triple from $600 billion to $1.8 trillion,” Heller, a multiple Wash100 Award winner, relayed.

The U.S. Space Force, which prior to five years ago did not exist, Heller pointed out, now commands a budget of $30 billion. Together with the business components brought onboard by Jacobs, Amentum is excited to partner with USSF and NASA on not just the technology development side of things but on scientific space endeavors.

“There’s typically strong funding [with science  because there’s that interest in pushing the boundary forward in our understanding of the universe,” noted Heller.

Amentum’s Intelligence Community Bid

Meanwhile, Heller says the merger has afforded Amentum to distinguish themselves as an $1.8 billion intelligence player. Individually, Amentum was “under-scale” in the Intelligence Community market: “We had a footprint, we had … customer access, but we didn’t have that end-to-end capability or the quite the scale we needed to go after the large enterprise contracts,” Heller admitted.

Now, however, the company is ready to position itself as a fierce competitor for “billion-dollar-plus contracts against the leaders in that marketplace.”

Energy and Environment Market for Amentum

“We’re a leader in environmental remediation work, especially on the nuclear side. Nuclear remediations really related to the Manhattan Project and all the nuclear development that [the U.S. has done] since World War II … It’s estimated that there is still approximately $500 billion of work to completely remediate what [the U.S.] created as a result of the Manhattan Project,” Heller said.

He said Amentum has an established relationship with the whole of the Department of Energy, but hopes to parlay that into a closer relationship with the National Nuclear Security Administration (a DOE agency) specifically.

Further, he acknowledged the toll per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, widely used synthetic substances also known as PFAS, have had environmentally and believes Amentum has a future in the cleanup effort for PFAS that could total $200 billion.

Where Amentum Is Now

After 10 months spent on integration efforts, the new Amentum is ready to go — if you call up the company now, Heller says, you will be speaking to a fully integrated team of Amentum and former Jacobs representatives; a unit that’s wholly one. They have realized their goal of getting “this company on a single enterprise basis,” so that they are not just a massive engineering enterprise but “one of the most efficient companies operating in the industry.”

Don’t miss the 2024 Homeland Security Summit on Nov. 13! Register for this GovCon networking event — annually among Potomac Officers Club’s most popular — today.