Rheinmetall

Rheinmetall traces its roots to 1889, when Heinrich Ehrhardt founded the Rheinische Metallwaaren- und Maschinenfabrik in Düsseldorf to manufacture artillery shells for the Imperial German Army. The headquarters has stayed in Düsseldorf for more than a century. Today the group is run by chief executive Armin Papperger, who has led the company since 2013 and steered it from a mid-cap defence-and-automotive conglomerate into one of Europe’s largest arms manufacturers — a transformation marked by Rheinmetall’s promotion to the DAX, Germany’s blue-chip index, in March 2023.

The product line spans armour, artillery, ammunition, air defence and, increasingly, uncrewed systems. Rheinmetall builds the KF41 Lynx tracked infantry fighting vehicle and is the long-standing supplier of the smoothbore 120 mm gun and ammunition fitted to the Leopard 2 main battle tank. Its Skyranger 30 turret — a 30 mm cannon paired with short-range missiles and radar on a wheeled or tracked chassis — has become one of Europe’s reference answers to the small-drone problem and has been picked up by Germany, Austria, Denmark, Hungary and others. At DSEI in September 2025 the company unveiled the FV-014, a loitering munition with a high-explosive dual-purpose warhead, GPS-denied navigation and a range of roughly 100 kilometres; Rheinmetall has signalled production of up to a thousand units in the first year. Through Blohm+Voss the group also has a foothold in naval shipbuilding.

The war in Ukraine has reshaped Rheinmetall’s order book. The company has signed framework contracts with the German Bundeswehr worth tens of billions of euros — including a multi-year 155 mm artillery-shell agreement that runs into the 2030s — and has built new ammunition lines in Unterlüß and in Várpalota, Hungary, with a further plant under construction in Ukraine in partnership with the state-owned defence holding Ukroboronprom. Rheinmetall has supplied Marder and Leopard variants to Kyiv, repaired returning vehicles, and is producing 155 mm rounds for the Ukrainian artillery park.

In June 2025 Rheinmetall announced a partnership with the American firm Anduril to bring the Barracuda family of autonomous air vehicles to European customers. Under the agreement Anduril manufactures the airframes while Rheinmetall handles European sales, integration and after-sales support — a deal that fits a wider pattern of the Düsseldorf company pairing with software-led entrants, having previously taken a stake in the Munich AI defence start-up Helsing.

Rheinmetall trades on XETRA under the ticker RHM and has been one of the strongest-performing stocks on the German market since February 2022, with its share price rising more than tenfold on the back of European rearmament. The group employs in the region of thirty thousand people across its defence and automotive divisions, and Papperger has said publicly that he expects defence to account for the overwhelming majority of revenue within the next few years as the civilian-vehicle business is gradually spun down or sold.

Controversy has tracked the firm’s growth. German prosecutors investigated Rheinmetall’s South African subsidiary RWM Italia over the supply of Mk 80-series bombs used by the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, and exports to Riyadh were suspended by Berlin in 2018. In July 2024 German federal authorities disclosed an alleged Russian plot to assassinate Papperger, an episode widely read as a sign of how central Rheinmetall has become to the supply of arms to Ukraine.