SAES - Sociedad Anonima de Electronica Submarina

SAES was set up in 1989 by Inisel and Bazan, the ancestors of Indra and Navantia, to give Spain a domestic capability in underwater acoustics. Thales joined the shareholder register in 1992 and the state holding company SEPI sits on it as well, which is why the company carries the S.M.E. suffix reserved for Spanish state commercial entities. The first job was a tactical trainer for the S-70 Agosta class submarines. Headquarters are in Cartagena, deliberately next door to the Navantia submarine yard, with a second site in San Fernando near Cadiz. Roughly a hundred people work there and most of them are engineers. For a company that size the product range is unusually wide, because underwater acoustics, magnetics and electric field measurement all draw on the same physics.

Sonar is the anchor. SOLARSUB is the third generation of long range towed array sonar the company has built for submarines, using digital hydrophone technology, and the reelable DTAS version lets a boat stream and recover the array on a winch rather than leaving it fixed. That work fed directly into Spain's S-80 submarine programme, where SAES supplies sonar and the tactical simulators used to train crews. Anti submarine warfare on the surface and in the air is handled by a separate family. ROASW is the remotely operated ASW system, sold to the Swedish Navy for the Visby class corvettes under its earlier SDL designation. SPAS processes sonobuoy acoustics for maritime patrol aircraft and helicopters, FTAS does fast time analysis of recorded acoustic data, and TAT is the tactical acoustic trainer that keeps operators sharp between deployments. Simulation is treated as a product line rather than a training add on, which follows from the company having started life building one.

The second half of the business is signatures. Ships and submarines leak magnetic, electric, pressure, acoustic and seismic energy, and a navy that does not know its own emissions cannot plan around enemy sensors or its own mine threat. The Multi Influence Range System measures all five in controlled water so a hull can be characterised and then degaussed or otherwise treated. The same understanding runs in reverse into naval mines. SAES builds the Minea and Mincoa families in both exercise and combat versions, plus Remora, a limpet mine carried by special forces divers. Mines and ranges are two views of the same problem, since a magnetic or pressure influence fuze only works if you understand what a hull radiates, and the company sells both sides of that equation to the same navies. Harbour and critical infrastructure protection uses the acoustic sensing stack again, this time to detect divers and small underwater vehicles approaching a berth. Environmental noise monitoring is sold to civil customers on the same hardware. Around all of it sits engineering services, simulation, training and through life support, and the customer list runs past the Spanish Navy to foreign fleets and to prime contractors including Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.