Arquus

Arquus supplies most of the wheeled armoured vehicles the French Army drives, and the company took its present shape in 2018 when Renault Trucks Defense, ACMAT and Panhard were folded into a single brand. Ownership changed after that. Volvo Group sold the business to Belgium's John Cockerill in a deal completed on 2 July 2024, with the French and Belgian states each taking a ten percent holding, and Arquus now trades as part of John Cockerill Defense. The commercial logic is a hull from Versailles-Satory carrying a Cockerill turret quoted as one package, which is how the FENRIS fire support vehicle and the turreted MAV'RX have been shown at recent exhibitions. Around 25,000 Arquus vehicles are in French service.

The armoured vehicle range is deliberately wide. It runs from tactical trucks such as the VLRA and the Zetros derivative developed with Daimler Truck, through protected patrol and reconnaissance platforms including the Bastion, the Sherpa family, the VBL, the PVP and the VT4, to personnel and systems carriers built on the VAB Mk3 and the newer MAV'RX, and on to heavier fighting systems in the FORTRESS Mk2 class. Homeland security customers buy the same hulls in border control, law enforcement and counter terrorism configurations. Alongside complete vehicles the company sells subsystems, principally the HORNET remotely operated weapon stations and the powertrain packages that sit between a driver's steering wheel and the road wheels. The Scarabee hybrid reconnaissance demonstrator shows where the engineering money is going.

The SCORPION program anchors the order book. Arquus works inside a grouping with KNDS France and Thales, designs and builds the complete Griffon powertrain, supplies HORNET stations for both the Griffon and the Jaguar, and runs spare parts logistics for all three partners from a platform opened at Garchizy in 2019. European projects and industrial cooperation agreements push the same components into partner programs and export assembly arrangements. Support Solutions is the second business and it is larger than outsiders assume, covering in-service support, logistic support analysis and documentation, telediagnosis and on-site intervention under the TRUST offer, mobile and relocatable field workshops, maintenance and driver training including virtual reality courses, industrial regeneration of vehicles returning from operations, and additive manufacturing of scarce parts. Saint-Nazaire is the centre of excellence for that work, and it absorbed maintenance activity previously spread across Limoges, Garchizy and Marolles-en-Hurepoix. About a million spare parts ship each year. More than five hundred technical interventions are carried out annually on customer sites, and roughly 30,000 vehicles worldwide sit under some form of Arquus support arrangement. Co-conception is the word the company uses for its way of working, with the armed forces brought into a specification long before acceptance trials. The plants divide the labour. Limoges builds new vehicles, Garchizy produces armoured cabs and distributes spares, and Marolles-en-Hurepoix handles assembly, painting, retrofit and the repair of mechanical components. Turnover sits at roughly 600 million euros and the company claims about ninety percent of the French Army's wheeled fleet.