Escribano Mechanical & Engineering

Escribano Mechanical & Engineering trades as EM&E Group and is still owned by the family that started it. The business opened in Alcala de Henares, east of Madrid, in 1989, doing precision machining to other people's drawings. That machine shop is still underneath everything else. Above it sits a defence group of roughly 1,700 people selling into more than 25 countries, with revenue of 488 million euros in 2025 against 355 million the year before, organised into seven product lines that share the same optics, stabilisation and control software. Vertical integration is the pitch. The group machines its own parts, writes its own control software and builds its own electronics, and it uses that to argue for sovereign Spanish supply.

Remote stations are the visible half of the company. Guardian covers land platforms and Sentinel covers ships, both gyro-stabilised on two axes with day and night channels and automatic target tracking. Guardian 2.0 takes a 12.7mm machine gun and can be rebuilt around 5.56mm, 7.62mm or a 40mm grenade launcher, Guardian L-HIT carries the M230LF chain gun, and the 30mm Guardian 30 was selected for the Spanish Army's VCR Dragon 8x8. At sea the Sentinel 30 is fitted to the Peruvian Navy's BAP Pisco, while the Sentinel TAO close-in mount pairs a 25mm rotary cannon with the same fire control. Electrooptical systems form the second line. OTEOS handles detection, recognition and tracking in the visible and infrared bands, APOLO works across three wavebands and identifies targets beyond ten kilometres, and the VTC Dual puts one or two sensors on a vehicle roof.

Guidance systems convert stockpiled ammunition into precision rounds. The Alkon kit pairs GNSS with an inertial unit and comes in versions for 120mm mortar bombs, 122mm rockets and 155mm artillery. Robotics arrived by acquisition, EM&E having bought aunav in 2024, and the line runs from the aunav.NEO HD and aunav.NEXT unmanned ground vehicles through the aunav.CID Light route clearance arm to the shared aunav.ROCS control unit. The Guardia Civil picked it to replace the robots used by its explosive ordnance teams. Counter-drone work carries the ODIN name in towed, mobile and fixed forms, shown during 2025 on the Uro Vamtac ST5 and on the company's own Ferox 6x6 armoured vehicle. The EMOC mortar carrier does the equivalent job for indirect fire, removing the baseplate, the digging and the manual laying so a tube can shoot from a light truck and move again. EM&E Electronics supplies the group from inside, making radio frequency circuits and printed boards, photonic subsystems through DAS Photonics, and slip rings for rotating structures.

Ownership has been noisy. Angel Escribano, one of the founding brothers, chaired Indra Sistemas and resigned in April 2026 after a proposed combination of the two companies fell through. The family firm had built a 14.3 per cent holding in the Spanish prime and placed the whole lot with investors the following month for about 1.3 billion euros. The merger itself was never completed and the two sides were still at a standstill in mid-2026. EM&E itself stays private.