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Concept
Plessey
Summary
The Plessey Company plc was a British electronics, defence and telecommunications company. It originated in 1917, growing and diversifying into electronics. It expanded after World War II by acquisition of companies and formed overseas companies.
It was listed on the London Stock Exchange and was a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. In 1989, it was taken over by a consortium formed by GEC and Siemens which split the assets of the Plessey group.
The majority of Plessey's defence assets were amalgamated into BAE Systems in 1999 when British Aerospace merged with the defence arm of GEC, Marconi Electronic Systems (MES). A small portion of the defence market, mostly embedded electronic systems and circuitcards remained with GE, formerly GE Fanuc and GE Intelligent Platforms (GE-IP) and now Abaco Systems based in Huntsville, Alabama, and in Towcester, Northamptonshire. The bulk of Plessey's telecommunications assets were acquired by Ericsson through its 2005 acquisition of Marconi Communications, a successor company of GEC.
The Plessey company was founded in 1917 in Marylebone, central London. The original shareholders were Thomas Hurst Hodgson, C. H. Whitaker, Raymond Parker and his brother Plessey Parker. A talented German engineer, William Oscar Heyne, was employed by the company. Heyne later became the managing director and chairman of Plessey and was one of the key figures in the development of Plessey during the 1920s and 1930s. The company moved to Cottenham Road in Ilford early in 1919. In 1925, the original company was wound up and a new one was formed with a greater share capital. Most of the early work carried out by the company was in mechanical engineering.
An early customer of Plessey was a galvanising company called British Electro Chemists. One of that company's shareholders was Byron G. Clark, an American, who was also a business associate of T. H. Hodgson, one of the founders of Plessey. The Clark family would eventually dominate the management of Plessey for most of its history.
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