BAE Systems Bofors

Karlskoga has made guns for a very long time and the Bofors name has been attached to artillery for most of it. The plant is now BAE Systems Bofors, part of the group's Weapon Systems business inside Land and Armaments, with roughly 600 people working shift patterns that have run around the clock since European ammunition demand jumped after 2022. The unit sits inside BAE Systems Land and Armaments alongside operations at Barrow in the United Kingdom and Hattiesburg and Minneapolis in the United States. Four lines come out of the site: naval gun systems, wheeled artillery systems, ground based air defence and the ammunition and explosives that feed all three.

At sea the company sells two calibres. The Bofors 57 Mk3 is a 57mm dual purpose mount carried by Swedish, Finnish, Canadian and US Navy hulls, where it is designated Mk 110, and the 40 Mk4 is a lighter 40mm mount aimed at corvettes and patrol vessels. Belgium and the Netherlands ordered twelve 40 Mk4 mounts between them for new mine countermeasures vessels. Both guns are built around programmable 3P ammunition, a single round a gunner can fuze for proximity, impact, timed airburst or armour piercing without changing what sits in the magazine.

On land the flagship is Archer, a 155mm 52 calibre howitzer on a wheeled chassis with the crew kept inside an armoured cab. It stops, lays and fires within thirty seconds of a call for fire, puts six rounds out, moves 500 metres and is ready again inside two minutes, reaching beyond 50 kilometres at up to nine rounds a minute. Sweden took it into service in 2016 and the British Army has since fielded it. The gun has been offered on 6x6 Volvo, 8x8 RMMV and 10x10 Oshkosh chassis, so a customer can choose the truck underneath it. Tridon Mk2 packages the 40 Mk4 gun, an optronic fire control unit and 3P rounds into a containerised air defence system that engages aircraft and drones out to 12,500 metres at 300 rounds a minute, and Sweden placed a production order in 2026 after six firing sessions at the Karlskoga range against fixed and rotary wing drones of several sizes. The Bofors LEMUR remote weapon systems family rounds out the weapons side, taking barrels up to 30mm and 40mm automatic grenade launchers on vehicles and ships.

Ammunition is where the intelligence lives. BONUS, developed with the French group KNDS, is a 155mm carrier shell that separates over a target area and releases two sensor fuzed submunitions, each scanning up to 32,000 square metres for an armoured vehicle. Excalibur, the guided 155mm round Bofors builds with Raytheon, is the precision end of the same magazine. The plant also supplies the 40mm gun carried by the CV9040 infantry fighting vehicle, sells simulation and training systems for gun crews, and does its proof and development firing at the Bofors Test Center range on its doorstep. It bought the Karlskoga precision machining firm Aston Harald Mekaniska Verkstad to secure supply for Archer, Tridon and the naval mounts.