Factory to produce 50 million rounds of small calibre ammunition per year
idD Portugal Defense, the state-owned defence holding company, plans to set up a small-calibre ammunition factory in Alcochete, in an investment of around 40 million euros.
The project has been finalised and will be presented to the government in the coming months.
The aim is to equip the Armed Forces with this type of projectile and export it to NATO countries, marking Portugal’s return to the production of these explosives.
The investment, next to the idD demilitarisation unit, is expected to be shared between 35% and 60% by the state. The factory will have the capacity to produce 50 million rounds of ammunition a year and create 70 jobs. The information was given to Jornal de Notícias by Ricardo Alves, chairman of the Board of Directors of the public company whose mission is to promote public policies for the Defence Economy.
“There is a shortage of stock”
This is small calibre ammunition, 5.56 and 7.62 mm, used by all the national forces deployed and by NATO armies in their small arms, a Portuguese Army source has confirmed to JN. The main small arms in service with the Portuguese navy are, for example, the SCAR-L in calibre 5.56×45 mm NATO and the SCAR-H in calibre 7.62×51 mm NATO. These calibres are also present in light machine guns.
“There is a huge growing demand for this ammunition because there has been a series of decades in which there has been no investment and many countries have run out of stock.
idD is working with a foreign partner who will support the development of knowledge for the production of these projectiles, “although the country has skilled labour”, adds the paper.
The production of ammunition is a declared ambition of the government. Nuno Melo announced last year that partners, locations and business models had already been identified. “It’s one of the areas in which we know that the entire European Union, I would say the Western world, is deficient. The need to produce ammunition has been identified at government level,” he said in Parliament.
Prime minister Luís Montenegro has also defended the production of “arms and ammunition”, challenging Portuguese entrepreneurs to invest in the defence industry. The project is aligned with the reinforcement of the budget by around one billion euros for “direct investment in equipment purchases, infrastructure and the valorisation of our human resources”, he added.
Destroying ammunition is already a profitable business
Portugal is already part of the group of countries that destroy tonnes of ammunition every year. “Ammunition has a life cycle, like any product, and when it reaches the end of its shelf life, the explosive becomes very unstable and has to be destroyed,” points out Ricardo Alves, noting that there is still material from the Colonial War that needs to be destroyed. This activity is also carried out by idD Portugal Defense, which destroys around 14 tonnes of projectiles of various sizes at the demilitarisation unit in Alcochete. The work is done with the Portuguese Armed Forces, but the aim is to expand to the foreign market. ‘We’re establishing contracts, especially with the nearest countries, to see if we can provide this service,’ says Alves
At the moment, there are more than 400 organisations in Portugal working in the sector, Alves added – citing one that “sells combat rations to the US army”, and two or three “that are very good at producing drones”.
What the country doesn’t have at the moment, he admitted, is the capacity to produce a fighter jet. “The policy that the Ministry of Defence is implementing is that this purchase should involve national industry as much as possible”.
Source material: Jornal de Notícias
