Avio S.p.A.

Avio makes solid propellant rocket motors at Colleferro, an industrial town southeast of Rome that has been handling propellant since the interwar years, and it splits its work between two segments built on the same chemistry. Space is the larger and better known half. Defence is the half growing fastest. Revenue reached 542 million euros in 2025, up 23 per cent on the year, against an order backlog of 1.86 billion euros and more than 1,500 staff spread across Italy, France, the United States and French Guiana. The shares trade on the STAR segment of Euronext Milan under the ticker AVIO, with Leonardo holding roughly a fifth of the register. Colleferro is the main plant, with further sites in Campania, Piedmont and Sardinia.

The space segment covers launchers, propulsion systems and payload adapters. Avio is prime contractor for Vega C, the small lift European launcher, and now sells launch services on it directly for institutional, scientific and commercial payloads from cubesats up to large observation spacecraft. The first stage is the P120C, a monolithic solid motor developed with ArianeGroup through the Europropulsion joint venture and, when it qualified, the largest single-piece solid rocket motor built anywhere. The same motor flies as a strap-on booster on Ariane 6, which makes Avio a supplier to the launcher it competes against. Above it sit the Zefiro 40 second stage and the earlier Zefiro 23 and Zefiro 9, with the liquid AVUM upper stage handling final orbital insertion. Vega E swaps that upper stage for the MR10, a 100 kilonewton liquid oxygen and methane engine built with heavy use of additive manufacturing. Avio also leads the service module for Space Rider, the European reusable reentry vehicle, and picked up a 40 million euro European Space Agency contract in 2025 for reusable upper stage development.

Defence covers three programme areas the company groups as air defense, antiship and deep strike, and battlefield engagement. It designs and produces solid propulsion and aerodynamic surfaces for tactical missiles across all three, and the roll call is mostly European. Defence sat near a fifth of turnover in the 2025 financial year, and the company has told investors it expects that share to grow sharply over the coming decade. Aster sits behind the SAMP/T land system and naval area defence, while CAMM-ER is the extended range missile Italy adopted for medium range air defence. MBDA France placed an order worth around 50 million euros in July 2025 for Aster 30 propulsion. Work for the United States is newer and moving quickly. Raytheon ordered 26 million dollars of Mk 104 dual thrust rocket motors, and shareholders approved a 400 million euro capital increase aimed largely at a new American solid rocket motor plant, with non-binding agreements signed with Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, a site of roughly 1,200 acres, up to 2,000 tonnes of propellant a year and operations targeted for early 2028.