how the Thales factory in Northern Ireland plans to quadruple its missile production in 2025

Thales plans to accelerate the production of missiles for Ukraine, while the European Union is doubling down on its arms budget.

In Northern Ireland, Thales has announced the doubling of missile production since the start of the war in Ukraine and plans the same for 2025. An objective which comes at a time when the European Council has announced that it wants to increase its production by 5 billion euros. arms budget for kyiv. And at the meeting of Ukraine’s allies in Ramstein, Germany this week, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin confirmed that the Ukrainians’ most urgent request was for anti-aircraft weapons.

Except that Europe finds itself in the position of having to provide this weaponry alone, the American budgets to do so remaining blocked in Congress. Nothing impossible in fact: the European defense industry has worked hard to produce these sophisticated and effective weapons.

LMM surface-to-air missiles or Starstreak missiles, these are the anti-aircraft weapons built by Thales UK in Belfast and which are causing misfortune in Ukraine: effective against Russian helicopters, fighters and even drones, weapons that Kiev is increasingly demanding. No one wants to say how many pieces were delivered, mainly by the United Kingdom, but we are talking in the hundreds. The Belfast factory where these precision weapons, capable of hitting a flying target the size of a basketball at 5 km, are assembled, has worked hard.

“Since the beginning of the war until today we have doubled the production of what comes out of this factory.”

Alex Cresswell, CEO of Thales UK

at franceinfo

“Production has doubled in two years, and it will double again in the next two years, explains Alex Cresswell. And we were able to do that by using the building that you saw to optimize production, so as to reduce the production time of a machine by half: productivity is therefore double what it was before.”

“Very accelerated” delivery times

And it’s not just the missiles themselves: these can be fired by a single man or in series, from a vehicle like the Rapid Ranger. David Oliveira oversees the integration of the Starstreak and LMM weapon systems on the Rapid Ranger. “Assembly lasts between six and eight weeks, he specifies. Today, we still have production underway, regardless of any contract. We invested in lots of Rapid Ranger and we are currently building them. And we can now respond to customer requests and offer them very accelerated delivery times compared to the industry standard.”

Between the continuous production of certain systems outside of orders, the hiring of around a hundred operators, and the setting up of new production lines, Thales UK has put its hand into the portfolio itself, confirms Alex Cresswell. “We increased the volume of our balance sheet for last year by 60 million.”

A record year 2023 for Thales

Doubling production volumes can even be done in a few weeks. In this hall, the launch tubes for the NLAW anti-tank missile, co-produced with the Swedish Saab, are also widely used in Ukraine. Six assembly lines that did not exist at the start of January, explains Philipp McBride, executive director of Thales UK. “Two months ago, it was much smaller, depending on the pace of production that was required of us. Obviously, there was an increase in customer demand. And because of this market demand, we had to really accelerate this production. We at least doubled it. And that’s what you see here: the industrial capacities that allowed us to do it.”

The Thales group, champion of defense electronics, to which Thales UK is affiliated, had a very successful year in 2023 with a total of 18.4 billion euros in sales.