BAE Systems Hägglunds

Everything BAE Systems builds at Ornskoldsvik runs on tracks. The site opened in 1899 as AB Hagglund and Soner, a general engineering works that made furniture and railway carriages long before it turned to military vehicles, and it passed through Alvis to BAE Systems in 2004. Around 2,000 people design, weld, assemble and support two families of tracked vehicles there. The order book behind them runs to several hundred vehicles.

The combat vehicles line is the CV90. Sweden fielded the original CV9040 with a Bofors 40mm gun, and export versions followed with 30mm and 35mm Bushmaster cannon, the CV9030 going to Norway, Switzerland and Finland and the CV9035 to the Netherlands and Denmark. Finland took 102 CV9030FIN, Switzerland 186 CV9030CH, Norway 164 across variants, Denmark 45 CV9035DK and the Netherlands 193 CV9035NL. The CV90120 replaces the turret with a 120mm L44A1 gun and gives a medium chassis the firepower of a main battle tank, while Armadillo strips the turret out entirely for troop carrying, ambulance and engineering roles. The current production standard is the CV90 MkIV, with a new powerpack, a digital electronic architecture and provision for active protection, and it is what the Czech Republic ordered 246 of in 2023 and Slovakia another 152. Fifty Swedish CV9040C hulls went to Ukraine from June 2023, which put the vehicle into a peer conflict for the first time.

The all terrain family is quieter and stranger. Articulated twin body vehicles on wide rubber band tracks, they exert less ground pressure than a walking soldier and swim without preparation. The Bv206 has served since the early 1980s across dozens of armies, carrying mortars, radios, casualties and the ARTHUR counter battery radar. Its armoured successor the BvS10 comes in ambulance, personnel carrier, mortar, missile, logistics flatbed, remote weapon station and repair and recovery configurations, with up to six tonnes of payload behind ballistic and mine protection. Beowulf is the unarmoured cousin, rated for fourteen people and roughly eight tonnes of payload at 65 kilometres an hour, and it sells to civil agencies for firefighting and disaster relief alongside armies. Hagglunds also assembled Sweden's Stridsvagn 122 main battle tanks in partnership with Krauss-Maffei Wegmann.

Through life support is the third strand, and on a fleet that runs for forty years it is the part customers negotiate hardest. The Ornskoldsvik operation sells sustainment packages, availability based service contracts, spares, mid life upgrades and crew and maintainer training, drawing on more than fifty years of tracked vehicle work. Capacity has been the constraint lately. Floor space has grown by about 30 percent and a new welding hall is due to double welding capacity, which is the practical bottleneck on how fast CV90 hulls can leave the factory. A separate facility opened in 2024 to take the expanded CV90 line, and the welding hall is due in service late in 2026. Both vehicle families are exported far more than they are sold at home.