Collins Aerospace GC Christoph Feddersen on Recent $30 Billion Merger

Christoph Feddersen, Collins Aerospace.

Christoph T. Feddersen was recently named vice president and general counsel of Collins Aerospace following United Technologies Corp.'s $30 billion acquisition of avionics maker Rockwell Collins. The deal was the biggest in aerospace history and led to the creation of Collins Aerospace, one of the world’s largest aerospace systems makers.

“We provide everything from nose to tail” of the plane, Feddersen said in a phone interview Tuesday.

Feddersen, who grew up in Germany, joined United Technologies in 2006 as a Belgium-based assistant general counsel, European legal and regulatory. In 2015, he was promoted to vice president and general counsel for UTC Aerospace Systems in Charlotte, North Carolina. He holds a doctorate in international trade law from the Universities of Hamburg and Bonn, Germany as well as a Master of Laws from the University of Michigan Law School and was an Emile Noel Fellow at Harvard Law School. He is admitted to the bars of New York, District of Columbia and Frankfurt am Main, Germany, according to his LinkedIn account.

“U.S. companies tend to be very U.S-centric,” said Feddersen, who is now based in West Palm Beach, Florida. But to be an effective GC of a global company with a stateside headquarters, it’s important to have “an interest in other cultures ... and be open to different ideas and thoughts that you may not be used to,” he said.

After UTC Aerospace Systems and Rockwell Collins were combined in November, Feddersen was named VP and GC of Collins Aerospace. He and his team had focused on the integration planning phase of the merger, which he described as a “remarkable success story of two companies coming together with similar cultures.”

Feddersen noted that Rockwell Collins’ chairman, president and CEO, Kelly Ortberg, became the CEO of Collins Aerospace. And UTC Aerospace Systems’ president, Dave Gitlin, transitioned to the role of president and chief operating officer at Collins Aerospace. Gitlin earned a JD from the University of Connecticut School of Law and an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

“I don’t think we really had big challenges,” Feddersen said of the merger. “The good thing was both sides came to an agreement fairly early … and the cultures mesh well. That was probably one of the biggest benefits of this deal.”

But the merger took several months longer than expected to complete, due largely to delays in getting approval from regulators. The U.S. Department of Justice approved the deal Oct. 1, but Connecticut-based UTC waited another five weeks for Chinese regulators to OK the acquisition, Feddersen said.

Asked if the delay in China might have been the result of trade tensions, Feddersen said: “I don’t have insight as to why it took longer. But I don’t think it was a function of them Chinese regulators not liking the deal. There was a clear realization that this is benefiting the marketplace—and you have a big chunk of that market in China.”

Feddersen also was involved in UTC’s $18.4 billion acquisition of Goodrich Corp. in 2012, which was the largest aerospace merger at the time, he said. In a reverse of what happened during the UTC-Rockwell Collins merger, Chinese regulators approved the Goodrich deal before U.S. regulators, according to Feddersen.

Collins Aerospace has 70,000 employees in 300 locations around the world, and the company is constantly looking to streamline its supply chain out of a desire to stay competitive and lean, Feddersen said. But he did not believe that trade conflicts had provided extra motivation to look outside China for suppliers.

“I’m not sure we would realign our supply chain strategies because of what is hopefully a temporary rift in trade relations,” he said. “If this is a more stationary situation and will prevail for the next 20 years, that is a different story.”