Kongsberg Maritime

Kongsberg Maritime is the marine-systems division of Kongsberg Gruppen, the Norwegian industrial group whose roots run back to a state weapons factory founded in 1814. The maritime arm in its current form dates to 1987, when Kongsberg consolidated its shipboard automation and hydroacoustic businesses under one roof. It is headquartered in Kongsberg, the small inland town south-west of Oslo that gives the parent group its name, and operates engineering and service sites across Norway, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, the United States, Singapore, and South Korea. The division grew sharply in 2019 when Kongsberg Gruppen acquired Rolls-Royce Commercial Marine, folding propulsion, thrusters, and ship-design teams into the existing automation and sensors business.

The product line is centred on the systems that decide where a vessel is, where it is pointing, and what is happening in the water around it. Kongsberg’s K-Pos dynamic-positioning systems hold offshore platforms and supply vessels on station without anchors, and its K-Chief and K-Bridge automation suites run the engine, power, and navigation stacks on merchant ships. On the acoustic side it builds the EM multibeam echo sounders used for seabed mapping, the EK fisheries sonars, the HiPAP underwater positioning systems used to track divers and remotely operated vehicles, and the HUGIN family of autonomous underwater vehicles — torpedo-shaped craft used for hydrographic survey, mine countermeasures, and intelligence-gathering on the seabed. The HUGIN Endurance, unveiled in 2022, is rated for missions of up to fifteen days and several thousand kilometres without surfacing.

Defence customers sit alongside the offshore-energy and merchant-shipping business. The Royal Norwegian Navy operates HUGIN-derived vehicles for mine warfare, and the system has been bought by the navies of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia, and several others. Kongsberg Maritime supplies the autonomy and integration package for the Yara Birkeland, the Norwegian-flagged container vessel that has been operating without a crew on board between Heroya and Brevik since 2022 — one of the first commercial demonstrations of an autonomous oceangoing ship. The division also provides the propulsion, automation, and bridge systems on a long list of NATO auxiliary and patrol classes, including British Type 26 frigates and Royal Norwegian Navy coastguard vessels.

Kongsberg Gruppen does not break out maritime revenue in detail, but the segment reported revenues of about NOK 32 billion in 2024 and employed roughly 8,500 people at year-end, making it the largest of the group’s four divisions by headcount. The parent company is listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange, with the Norwegian state holding just over fifty percent of the shares through the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Fisheries.

The business has not been free of controversy. In 2018 a Kongsberg subsidiary pleaded guilty in Norway to corruption charges over payments made to secure communications contracts in Romania in the early 2000s, a case that touched several parts of the group. Hydroacoustic exports have also drawn scrutiny: the dual-use nature of the HUGIN platform, capable of both civilian survey and military reconnaissance, places Kongsberg Maritime in the slow-moving licensing regime that governs Norwegian sales of underwater autonomy to non-aligned customers.

What sets the division apart is the depth of its hold on the unglamorous middle of the maritime stack — the dynamic positioning, the multibeam sonar, the underwater navigation — that almost every survey ship, oil platform, and naval auxiliary in the western world quietly depends on. Its current work on long-endurance autonomous underwater vehicles and crewless surface ships is an attempt to extend that grip into the next generation of seabed warfare and merchant shipping.