Saab AB

Saab AB was founded in 1937 in Linköping as Svenska Aeroplan AB, set up to give Sweden a domestic source of military aircraft as the security situation in Europe deteriorated. The group is headquartered in Stockholm, with its core development and manufacturing still anchored in Linköping, and is listed on Nasdaq Stockholm under the ticker SAAB-B. Micael Johansson has run the company as president and CEO since 2019, succeeding Håkan Buskhe. The Wallenberg sphere, through Investor AB, remains the dominant shareholder and has shaped the firm’s long-term industrial posture for decades.

The product line is unusually broad for a country of ten million people. The JAS 39 Gripen multirole fighter is the flagship — the latest E/F generation flies for the Swedish, Brazilian, Hungarian, Czech, Thai and South African air forces, and Colombia signed for sixteen aircraft in 2025. On the airborne early-warning side, the GlobalEye combines a Bombardier Global 6000 airframe with Saab’s Erieye ER radar and a sensor-fusion suite that ties together air, sea and ground tracks; Sweden, the UAE and France are customers. Saab also builds the RBS-15 anti-ship missile, now reaching the Mk4 standard for the German Navy, and the air-defence family Giraffe, Arthur and the long-range GlobalEye-derived radars. Its Dynamics business produces some of the most heavily used infantry weapons of the war in Ukraine: the disposable AT4, the Carl-Gustaf recoilless rifle, and the NLAW anti-tank missile co-developed with Britain’s Thales UK, which Ukrainian crews have used in large numbers against Russian armour since 2022.

The company is pushing hard into autonomy and software-defined warfare. In 2025, Saab and Helsing demonstrated a Gripen E flown in a beyond-visual-range engagement under control of Helsing’s Centaur AI agent, an experiment that put a European airframe at the centre of the manned–unmanned teaming debate. Saab also flies the autonomous AEW concept Globaleye-derived testbeds and is developing the loyal-wingman drone work tied to its Future Combat Air programme participation. In maritime, the Kockums yard in Karlskrona builds the A26 submarine for Sweden and is bidding the design abroad.

The numbers reflect the European rearmament cycle. Saab employed roughly 27,800 people in 2025, up sharply from around 18,000 before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and reported order intake well above sales as backlogs filled out. Sweden’s accession to NATO in March 2024 opened procurement doors that had been closed for the firm’s entire post-war history, and contracts for Gripen, GlobalEye, ground-based air defence and ammunition have followed from across the alliance.

Saab is not without friction. The Gripen’s South African sale in the late 1990s remained the subject of corruption investigations for years, and the company periodically faces scrutiny over export licences to customers in the Gulf and South-East Asia. Inside Sweden, debate over Kockums’ submarine work and the cost of the Gripen E programme has been a recurring political theme.

What sets Saab apart in 2026 is the unusual full-stack character of the business — fighters, AEW aircraft, submarines, anti-ship and anti-tank missiles, ground radars, electronic warfare and a growing autonomy stack — sustained by a country that treats domestic defence industry as strategic infrastructure rather than discretionary spending.