It is also one of four major service providers (MSPs) to the Department of Defence’s Capability Acquisition and Sustainment Group as the lead company in a consortium with PwC and British defence technology company QinetiQ.
With a workforce approaching 1000, Nova Systems has a presence in every mainland Australian state as well as the UK, New Zealand, Norway and Singapore.
Now headquartered in Mile End, the company was founded as Nova Aerospace in 1999 by Jim Whalley and Peter Nikoloff with its first office at Edinburgh north of Adelaide.
It was initially contracted to deliver flight test services to the Royal Australian Air Force.
The global engineering services and technology solutions company also is looking to ramp up its workforce as the Hunter Class shipbuilding program gains pace and its work with the maritime patrol aircraft based at the Edinburgh RAAF base ramps up.
Jim McDowell
Nova chief executive Jim McDowell said the appointment as a MSP to the ADF in 2018 was the first real indication the company was in a position to become “a really large Australian company with a purpose”.
He said the idea of developing Nova into a “horizontal prime” had been worked on since he joined the company in late 2020.
“The defence landscape in Australia has got half a dozen big guys at the top, all of whom are owned by foreign multinationals with the exception of ASC submarines, then you’ve got a gazillion small guys at the bottom and we’re now occupying that middle ground where we are small enough to care but big enough to matter,” McDowell said.
“We’ve got a lot of growth to get us to this middle point but we believe that in order to have real enduring staying power you need to step up another level to get an Australian defence essential services industry of scale.
“We can continue to think of prime contractors as verticals in terms of submarines and ships and airplanes and that sort of vertical whereas you have running through all of this as one of the sovereign industrial capability priorities is test evaluation, certification and systems assurance and we’re still the biggest player in the country in that space.”
Nova is also involved in commercial aerospace and has the necessary licences and regulatory approvals in Europe, Australia and the UK to modify special mission planes and helicopters in sectors such as emergency services.
In space, it has a satellite ground station in Peterborough in the state’s Mid North and is a founding member of AROSE (Australian Remote Operations for Space and Earth) and the Adelaide-based SmartSat CRC.
Nova last year also teamed up with Safran and BAE Systems Australia to create Team SABRE in a bid to deliver the Land 125 Phase 4 Integrated Soldier System.
“Over the next five years even if we do not do very much more of this and just keep doing what we’re doing, we’ll need about another 500 people,” McDowell said.
“Unemployment is at a historic low so we’re going to have to try and do more with less and that’s one of the underpinning arguments for the horizontal prime in test evaluation, certification and systems assurance.
“But over and above that organic growth we would see from MSP predominantly we should probably get to $450 to $500 million (axjmtzyw year revenue) over the four-to-five-year period.”
Nova’s work to modify special mission planes has included Victoria Police helicopters.
Nova Systems already has a growing presence in the UK and believes the AUKUS alliance struck last year will create many opportunities.
McDowell said the foreign policy move by the United States and its allies out of the Middle East while increasing the focus on the Indo Pacific would also create work.
