Eurenco

Eurenco makes the energetic materials that other companies load into ammunition. The company was formed in 2004 by merging the explosives and propulsion arm of France's SNPE with the Nordic producer Nexplo, and it sits inside GIAT Industries, the state holding that also owns half of KNDS. That places it squarely in the French state's defense industrial perimeter, which is why its expansion has been argued about as a sovereignty question rather than a commercial one. Around 1,100 people work across plants at Sorgues and Bergerac in France, Clermont at Engis in Belgium and Karlskoga in Sweden. Turnover was close to 300 million euros in 2023, and management has said it intends to double capacity and reach a billion euros by 2030.

About three quarters of output goes to defense, split across three product areas the company names itself. For medium and large calibre ammunition it supplies single base, multi base and LOVA propellants together with modular artillery charges, base bleed units and nitrofilm combustible items for artillery, tank, mortar and naval rounds. For missile warheads, bombs, penetrators, torpedoes and underwater munitions it casts conventional and insensitive explosive compositions and supplies booster relays and demolition charges, including the HEXOMAX malleable plastic explosive developed to replace older pentrite formulations. Small calibre work covers spherical and extruded propellants for military, hunting and sporting ammunition.

Upstream molecule production is what makes the rest possible. Eurenco produces hexogen, octogen, NTO and nitrocellulose, restarting the Bergerac nitrocellulose line in 2023 after years of European dependence on imports and building out hexogen capacity at Sorgues. The civil quarter of the business is not incidental. Eurenco Additives sells the VeryOne 2-EHN cetane improver, the largest such capacity in the world, into diesel and biodiesel markets, and the group supplies perforating charges for oil drilling and hydraulic fracturing plus shocktube and mini-boosters for mining. Propellants for airbag inflators and seatbelt pretensioners put the company inside most European car models. The best known recent contract is American. In September 2023 Eurenco and Day and Zimmermann were awarded a five-year US Army order worth about 966 million dollars for M231 and M232 series Modular Artillery Charge System combustible cartridge cases, backed by a new joint production line in the United States turning out more than a million charges a year. Two thirds of a century of chemistry sits behind that. The Engis plant in Belgium has taken an eighty million euro investment to double powder output and add nitroglycerin production, and the group bought MANUCO to secure high performance energetic nitrocellulose. Regulation shapes everything the company does, from transport rules to the emergency response drills run at Bergerac after the 2022 explosions there. The remaining quarter of production is civil, and it is what keeps the plants busy between defence order cycles.