philippe DUHAMEL

About philippe DUHAMEL

Philippe Duhamel is a senior French industrial executive with a long-standing career at Thales, one of the world’s leading groups in defence, aerospace, cybersecurity and digital identity. According to publicly available Thales information, he currently serves as Executive Vice-President, Defence Mission Systems, a key leadership role at the core of the Group’s defence business. His career has been built almost entirely within Thales, which he joined in 1987 in the Air Operations business. Over the years, he has held a series of progressively broader positions spanning engineering, bids, programme management, operations and business leadership. From 2001 to 2003, he was Director of Bids for Thales’s Air Traffic Control business, gaining experience at the intersection of complex systems engineering and commercial execution. In 2003, he moved to the Netherlands as Programme Director for naval radars and ground-based air defence systems, and in 2007 he became Vice President, Ground-Based Radars, within the Surface Radar business line. In 2010, Duhamel was appointed CEO of ThalesRaytheonSystems France, the French entity dedicated to air defence systems for armed forces worldwide. In 2013, he became Chief Executive Officer of ThalesRaytheonSystems. These roles placed him at the centre of mission-critical defence programmes requiring technical depth, multinational coordination and disciplined delivery. On 1 June 2016, he joined Thales’s Operations and Performance organisation as Senior Vice President for Operations and Operational Functions, before being named in 2017 Executive Vice-President, Defence Mission Systems. A graduate of the engineering school of the Institut National Polytechnique in Grenoble, and a member of the Institut des Hautes Études de Défense Nationale, Philippe Duhamel is best described as an engineer-executive. His expertise includes large programme leadership, radar systems, air defence, operational excellence and industrial transformation. His career reflects Thales’s ability to develop leaders from within its operational and technical ranks into top executive positions.