Saab Kockums

Saab Kockums is the naval and submarine arm of the Swedish defence group Saab AB, headquartered in Malmö and operating additional yards in Karlskrona, Docksta, and the underground Muskö base south of Stockholm. The business traces its lineage to a mechanical workshop founded by Frans Henrik Kockum in 1840, which through the twentieth century grew into one of Sweden’s largest shipbuilders. After a turbulent ownership period under Germany’s Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft and ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems, the Swedish state engineered a transfer to Saab in 2014, and the yard has carried the Saab Kockums name since. It sits inside Saab’s Kockums business area, which reports up through Saab’s group leadership in Stockholm.

The yard’s signature products are conventional submarines built around Stirling air-independent propulsion, a technology Kockums pioneered in the 1980s. The Gotland class, in service with the Swedish Navy since the late 1990s, became internationally known after one of the boats, HSwMS Gotland, was leased to the United States Navy in 2005 and reportedly defeated US carrier groups in exercises off San Diego. Its successor, the A26 Blekinge class, is now under construction in Karlskrona for the Swedish Navy, with the lead boats Blekinge and Skåne intended for delivery later in the decade. Above the waterline, Kockums is responsible for the Visby-class stealth corvettes, the Koster-class mine countermeasure vessels, and the CB90 fast assault craft used by Sweden, Mexico, Brazil, and several other navies.

The unmanned side of the portfolio has grown around the AUV62 family. AUV62-AT is a torpedo-shaped autonomous underwater vehicle that mimics the acoustic signature of a submarine and is used for anti-submarine warfare training; export customers include the Swedish, Italian, German and US Navies. The closely related AUV62-MR is configured for hydrographic survey and mine reconnaissance, carrying synthetic-aperture sonar for seabed mapping. Saab Kockums has also developed the Sea Wasp, a remotely operated vehicle designed for underwater improvised-device disposal, and is one of the partners in the Royal Swedish Navy’s effort to integrate uncrewed systems into littoral operations.

Order intake has accelerated since Sweden joined NATO in 2024. The Swedish government extended the A26 contract to fund mid-life upgrades on the Gotland class and additional work on the Visby corvettes, and Poland selected the A26-derived Orka design as the preferred bid in its Orka submarine programme in 2025, a deal valued in the multiple billions of euros and dependent on continued political agreement between Stockholm and Warsaw. Saab Kockums has been hiring aggressively in Karlskrona and Malmö to staff the work, and parent Saab has cited the naval business as one of the fastest-growing parts of the group.

The yard has not been free of friction. The 2014 ownership change was accompanied by a public dispute between the Swedish state and ThyssenKrupp over intellectual property and access to the Muskö base, and the long delays and cost growth on the A26 programme have drawn periodic criticism in the Swedish press. Even so, Saab Kockums occupies an unusual position in European defence: one of only a handful of yards still designing and building conventional submarines from scratch, and the principal supplier of underwater systems to a navy that now sits on NATO’s Baltic frontier with Russia.