Hartford Business Journal

18 HARTFORDBUSINESS.COM | DECEMBER 15, 2025 FOCUS | 5 We Watched Electric Boat President Mark Rayha at the submarine maker's Groton shipyard. Contributed Photo Full Throttle EB chief Rayha ramps up property purchases, hiring to meet sub production demands The renovation, which may run through 2027, will retain the building's basic layout. Rayha said the work will be done in phases, with employees beginning to move in as each section is completed. "There's a lot of good natural light in the center corridor, so we don't intend to change that. What we'll do is we'll modify the stores to make them into office spaces and labs," he said. The mall acquisition capped off a year of property expansions. The push began in January when EB acquired a 55-acre property in North Stonington with plans to build a 480,000-square-foot warehouse. Rayha said the site's location just off I-95 makes it an ideal hub for warehousing, quality inspection, and shipping and receiving — functions By Harriet Jones hjones@hartfordbusiness.com W hen Mark Rayha took the reins as Electric Boat's president in December 2024, the Groton submarine builder was in a rare hiring lull, pausing its recent rapid growth to allow its supply chain to catch up with the yard's progress. A year later, the picture is very different. "We're full blast on hiring again," Rayha said during a November interview with the Hartford Business Journal. "We're looking to probably add 300 to 400 for the end of the year." After that, he said, the goal is 1,000 hires annually for the next three years just at the Groton yard, with the aim of taking the total workforce past 30,000 eventually. That hiring — needed to support assembly and testing of the first Colum- bia-class submarine while also fulfilling the ongoing Virginia class program — has put heavy pressure on the company's waterfront shipyard, prompting EB to embark on a property-acquisition spree. The marquee event in 2025 was the purchase of the largely vacant Crystal Mall in Waterford for more than $30 million. The 780,000-square-foot complex is slated to be redeveloped into an engineering, training and soft- ware support hub. "Waterfront land is such a premium, we were looking for an opportunity to take any administrative functions that are important, but not necessary to be in the shipyard, and get them off-site," Rayha said. To that end, the company will continue managing the mall into 2026, winding down leases for the roughly 25 remaining stores and converting the building into office and lab space. Rayha said they may keep the existing food court to serve employees who will work at the site. "We want to be able to do that because I think the opportunity to have almost a full-service campus for our employees there is attractive to us," he said. "One of the things we're trying to work on, because we're growing pretty rapidly, is really trying to pay attention to the employee experience." EB President Mark Rayha at an October press conference announcing the purchase of the Crystal Mall in Waterford. HBJ Photo | Harriet Jones MARK RAYHA President Electric Boat Education: Bachelor's degree in business administration, Univer- sity of Michigan; MBA, University of Michigan Age: 59

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