Vickers-Armstrongs

Vickers-Armstrong formed after a merger between the two largest British arms producers in the early 20th century, Vickers and Armstrongs-Whitley, to better integrate and plan future naval construction for the Royal Navy as competition with the much more industrially advanced United States was looking an increasingly dire prospect. With the government already in the pocket of the largest industries, the newly minted merger would give the weapons industry the needed sway to push for a much more interventionist policy against potential threats to British hegemony from the Americans and quickly recovering Germans.
  The company would do well off of the back of the coming century of arms races, colonial conflicts and sale of technological developments to the civilian market, the deep roots in the British state would translate quickly into absorbing smaller states military industries as they fail to keep up with the ever increasing needs of competition to centralise and concentrate into larger and larger behemoths. Once The Solar Scramble began to heat up and the need for military capabilities off world became necessary the company would gain the contract for the first in orbit dry dock which would down the line lead to a near monopoly on large ship construction within the CoN.
 

Structure

While officially the company headquarters is still in the now nearly 600 year old Vickers complex in London on Earth, this is largely for prestige reasons and all real administration of the company is done from the city of Jarrow on New Clyde where the majority of the companies revenue is created. The largest single shareholder in the company is the British government with other CoN states also controlling a share, but this does not mean the company is government run, being long ago a major driving force behind British imperial policy along with other large companies, instead respective governments at various points over the years have used the buying of stock as ways of backroom dealing with VA for construction contracts, ship purchases, etc. VA is despite technically being majority national owned only answering to its shareholders and the heads of the banking monopolies such as HSBBC and Crédit Lyonnais.
 

History

 

1900s

Formed as a merger between Vickers and Armstrongs-Whitley in 1925 to bail out the bankrupt latter, the company would takes its place as the largest arms manufacturer and ship builder in the world from its predecessor Vickers who was left as the largest arms company after Germany's loss in the Great Imperial War left Krupp without a buyer to sell to. While Britain had defeated the upcoming rival of Germany and left her crushed under the weight of war debts, strangling her ability to recover and pose a threat again in the near future, the United States was a different story and one who would be much harder to prevent from displacing Britain off the top of the imperial pile. The British government was however for the moment tied down, the Russian civil war had further sapped British resources as they attempted in vain to strangle the nascent workers state in the crib before it could pose a wider threat to British imperialism.
  VA would suffer throughout the 1920s and into the early 1930s with very little domestic spending the company would take this lull in orders to drastically modernise production while ramping up exports to foreign markets, especially the newly resurgent Germany who was looking to re-arm and was willing to pay through the nose to get around treaty restrictions. This less than legal arrangement would however work out even better than planned for Vickers as these new weapon would be used again the Austrians kicking off the Anti-Kruppist war.
  By the end of the war VA would emerge stronger than ever and with a brand new arms race to compete in with the United States. The company would continue to do well off the back of this up until the 1990s and the end of the congo wars which saw demand for ammunition, small arms and aircraft dry up rapidly.
 

2000s

The company would decline rapidly as tensions cooled and once again they were faced with outdated production methods and a near complete collapse of international competitiveness. In 2023 the company would be bailed out by the British state and temporarily completely nationalised.