Hampson Industries PLC ("Hampson" or "the Group"), the international aerospace group, announces that its US-based Aerospace Composites & Transparencies division has been awarded a new contract worth USD 53 million (£34 million).

The contract, which is the largest ever and most complex single tooling contract secured by Hampson, is in respect of the design and manufacture of light weight mandrel tools for carbon fibre lay-up for a major commercial aerospace programme.

The contract value is expected to be realised over a twelve month period, commencing immediately and is not expected to require significant capital investment. Work will be undertaken at the Group's recently enlarged, California-based, Coast Composites, Inc. and Composites Horizons, Inc. facilities as well as at Detroit-based, Odyssey Industries, Inc.

Hampson's Chairman, Chris Geoghegan, commented:

"We are delighted to have secured this high value tooling contract after some months of delays in the conversion of our strong quote pipeline into firm orders.

"This is the second significant contract signed in recent weeks following on from the USD 10 million (£6.5 million) contract received in August. This latest win reflects Hampson's unique ability, as market leader, to provide a fully-integrated, one-stop technology solution in light-weight, precision tooling. This involves not only the lay-up of large, high temperature, very tight tolerance composite structures but also the deployment of high speed machining capacity and specialist fabrication expertise across three of our North American facilities.

"This contract follows many months of outstanding work by our people against a challenging market backdrop. It attests to the strength and depth of our technical capabilities in advanced composite materials and our ability to offer our global customers a unique value proposition using the latest available material and tooling technology."

With the new contract, the Group's gross and net book-to-bill ratios for the year to date now stand at 149% and 123%, respectively.

The new Group Chief Executive, Norman Jordan, took up his post on 1 September and is currently conducting a full review of the Group's activities, which may result in selective asset disposals if proper value can be realised from such an exercise.

In the meantime, Don Stockton, Chief Executive Officer, Tooling Operations, who was appointed in June, continues to implement a business improvement and cost reduction programme across the Group's tooling businesses. Actions initiated since his appointment include the consolidation of business support functions at the Michigan, US-based operations to further improve competitiveness. Additional operational improvements are expected to result from the on-going implementation of world-class enterprise resource planning systems across the businesses, which is expected to be substantially completed at the Detroit operations by 31 March 2011.