BAeSEMA

~ the obit ~

Nothing about this company was ever going to be visible from a dial-up connection in Ankara, or from anywhere else outside a dockyard. BAeSEMA wrote the software that told a Royal Navy submarine captain what was in the water around him. Its customers were the Ministry of Defence and the shipyards, its products were classified in parts, and the only reason any of it is readable today is that British companies have to file their names and dates with a public registry.

That registry is also where the dates come from, and they are exact. Company 02536912 was incorporated on 5 September 1990 under the name INTERCEDE 880 LIMITED, which is a shelf company, a legal body bought off the rack and waiting for someone to need it. On 29 July 1991 it was renamed BAESEMA LIMITED. Two days later a second shelf company, incorporated that April as SHELFCO (NO. 650) LIMITED, became BAESEMA SYSTEMS LIMITED. Both names landed inside the same week.

British Aerospace owned half and Sema Group owned half. According to BAeSEMA's own first annual report, as summarized by Grace's Guide, the two parents did not contribute equally in kind: Sema put in its subsidiary YARD Ltd and the Scientific Division of Sema Group Ltd, plus half the shares in Dowty-Sema and a transfer of staff. British Aerospace put in cash and staff. The engineering base came from one parent; the capital came from the other.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the boats ~

The work that survives in public description is naval command and control. Wikipedia's article lists the Type 23 frigate's command and control system and the Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarine's, plus prime contracting on HMS Scott, the ocean survey vessel whose actual construction was subcontracted to Appledore. The Submarine Command System article adds that by 1991 the SMCS project belonged to BAeSEMA, and that a team under Ray Foulkes picked Solaris on SPARC for the Swiftsure and Trafalgar upgrade. All of that rests on Wikipedia rather than on a document I could open, and I would not bet the specifics on it.

The competition was GEC-Marconi, working through the naval systems businesses it had absorbed from Ferranti and Plessey. That is a small market with two serious bidders in it, and eight years later one of them had bought the other.

~ what the venture was for, and why it did not work ~

British Aerospace wanted to be a naval prime contractor, the company a navy hands an entire warship program to. BAeSEMA was the vehicle. Wikipedia gives two reasons it failed at that, and both are about shipbuilding rather than software: a customer picking a prime would rather pick one that owns yards, and a shipbuilder asked to work under BAeSEMA would effectively be handing control of its own yard to a competitor's joint venture. You can write the best combat system in Britain and still lose the contract to the firm that can weld.

British Aerospace solved it by buying things. Wikipedia dates the buyout of Sema's half to 11 November 1998 at £77 million, citing a Science Museum Group record, and that figure is not independently confirmed here. What is confirmed is the registry: BAESEMA LIMITED became BRITISH AEROSPACE LAND AND SEA SYSTEMS LIMITED on 22 February 1999, and held that name for a year and a day before becoming BAE SYSTEMS (LAND AND SEA SYSTEMS) LIMITED. The same filing also quietly corrects Wikipedia, which says the company was "dissolved" in November 1998. It was not dissolved. It is still active today, registered in Camberley, trading under a name that no longer contains a trace of Sema.

The other half of the pair went the other way. BAESEMA SYSTEMS LIMITED became YARD LIMITED on 1 December 1997, carrying back the name of the Glasgow naval consultancy Sema had put into the venture in the first place, filed accounts as a non-trading company until 2012, and was dissolved on 15 November 2014. In the year after the buyout British Aerospace acquired Marconi Electronic Systems and became BAE Systems, which brought it Marconi Marine's shipyards at Barrow and Govan. That purchase got British Aerospace what the joint venture had been set up to get, eight years later and for a great deal more money.

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