Storm Shadow missile manufacturer faces difficulties - FT
Фото: Storm Shadow (Getty Images)
Europe's military assistance to Ukraine has one of its front lines in the historic city of Bourges in central France. Here, the European concern MBDA produces the Storm Shadow/Scalp and Aster cruise missiles, according to Financial Times.
Over the past three years, the company has invested heavily in new equipment and added hundreds of workers to accelerate production amid high demand, which has raised orders to a record level.
MBDA is on track to double production in 2025 compared to 2023. However, the concern is unable to expand production quickly due to inefficient production processes and supply chain difficulties. MBDA's order backlog has grown to €37 billion, and it will take about seven years to fulfill it at the current rate.
CEO Eric Beranger said that the group has to do more to adapt to the wartime economy, in which speed and volume have become crucial for the first time in decades.
He says they need to become much more industrialized, so to speak, to cope with the difficulties.
3 shareholders
MBDA has faced intense pressure from the French military to deliver its long-range Aster missiles faster. However, the complex Aster production process is a case in point. The unfinished weapon is transported across the Alps between France and Italy several times for different stages of production, adding months with little industrial benefit.
Such problems would be quite easy to solve if MBDA were a normal company, Beranger said. But for a cross-border defense group that needed to balance the interests of its shareholders - Airbus and Britain's BAE Systems each own 37.5% and Italy's Leonardo 25% - and the military it serves, it's much more complicated.
However, a proposal put forward last year by Beranger to simplify its production footprint was rejected by France, which saw the reorganization as a threat to its leadership in the group.
MBDA, conceived as a Franco-British collaboration in 1996 and joined by Italy in 2001, still stands out as one of Europe's few successful cross-border defense companies in a region that remains fragmented by national players. It produces some of the world's most sought-after missiles and competes with the US RTX and Lockheed Martin groups.
MBDA plans to invest €2.4 billion between 2023 and 2028 to increase production, and Berange said this amount could be increased if necessary.
The most complex rocket
At Bourget, the focus was on increasing the production of the Aster. The missile, which consists of 10,000 components, from titanium wings to high-performance computer chips, is one of the most complex weapons produced by MBDA.
One company employee admitted that the Aster was conceived when no one thought mass production would be needed, so there was no disadvantage to the complexity.
MBDA has reduced Aster's production time from more than three years in 2022 to just over 2 years and intends to go further. Progress has been better on the smaller, simpler Mistral and Akeron missiles.
In early March 2025, British Storm Shadow missiles became useless in Ukraine after Donald Trump briefly banned the United States from sharing intelligence with allies.
