Dynamit Nobel Defence GmbH

Dynamit Nobel Defence occupies a plant in Burbach, in the hills of the Siegerland, that traces back to the explosives business Alfred Nobel founded in the nineteenth century. The corporate line is more recent. When MG Technologies broke up Dynamit Nobel in 2004, the Burbach site and its weapons technology went to Rafael Advanced Defense Systems of Israel, and the German company has operated as a Rafael subsidiary ever since. It is small by prime standards, around 390 to 400 people on roughly 132 million euros of revenue in 2023, but its products are carried by infantry across NATO and its order book has grown sharply since 2022. The site is being expanded again and a second location opened near Kiel.

The core business is shoulder launched anti-armour. Panzerfaust 3 is the older line, a reusable firing device with disposable rounds that has served the Bundeswehr since the early 1990s, later joined by the Bunkerfaust round for fortifications and urban targets. The RGW family, for Recoilless Grenade Weapon, is the newer architecture and the one now driving exports. RGW 60 is the light end, sold in shaped charge, multi-purpose, squash head and anti-structure variants. RGW 90 is the heavier round, known internationally as MATADOR after the version developed with Singapore, and it comes in a tandem warhead form for armour, an anti-structure version, illumination and smoke rounds, and a long range multi-purpose model that the German Army fields as Wirkmittel 90 and has been buying since 2017. RGW 110 extends the calibre further. All of them use a countermass design that lets a soldier fire from inside a room without the backblast killing the crew, which is why they keep appearing in urban warfare requirements.

Beyond the launchers, the company sells vehicle protection, mostly explosive reactive armour packages and tailored appliqué kits fitted to combat and command vehicles, an area where the Rafael parent brings a deep catalogue. A mine laying line built around the SKORPION vehicle mounted system covers scatterable barrier laying for engineer units. Digital products came with the parent relationship as well. Fire Weaver is the networked sensor to shooter system that assigns targets automatically across a dispersed force and puts a cued aiming mark in each soldier's sight, and B-NET is the software defined radio family underneath it, offered in handheld and vehicular forms to German and European customers. The last segment is the least expected. Dynamit Nobel Defence also builds fire suppression and extinguishing systems, both the military versions that protect crew compartments and engine bays and a civil range sold under the Dynameco name, work that sits naturally beside a century of handling energetic materials. Development and qualification services run alongside the product catalogue, since a new warhead or propellant charge has to be proof tested and certified before any army will accept it, and Burbach has the ranges and test infrastructure to do that in house. The Rafael relationship cuts both ways. German customers get access to Israeli systems through a domestic supplier with a German works council and a German export licence, and Rafael gets a European manufacturing base at a moment when European governments are being asked to buy on the continent.