FFG Flensburger Fahrzeugbau Gesellschaft

FFG builds and rebuilds armoured vehicles in Flensburg, hard against the Danish border. The business started in 1963 as a division of the local shipyard, Flensburger Schiffbau-Gesellschaft, and was set up as a company in its own right in 1980. It spent the years from 1987 to 2001 inside the Diehl group before returning to private hands. Roughly a thousand people work there, spread across the old yard site on Werftstrasse, a second plant in the Nordstadt bought from Danfoss in 2013, and a third under construction at Handewitt due to open in 2027. Revenue reached around 760 million euros in 2025, close to five times the 2017 figure. In July 2026 the Cologne engine maker Deutz agreed to buy the company outright for 1.6 billion euros, part cash and part shares in the buyer. The Bundeskartellamt cleared it without conditions at the end of that month.

The in-house designs grouped under FFG Developments start with the WiSENT family. WiSENT 1 is an upgrade platform built to the ARV 2 standard, sold as a recovery vehicle with a 30 tonne crane and a 35 tonne winch, as an engineer vehicle with an excavator arm, and as a mine clearing variant with a full width plough. WiSENT 2 does the same work on a Leopard 2 chassis at up to 69.5 tonnes and adds a bridge layer that carries and lays MLC 80 tactical bridges. The ACSV G5 is the newer line, a tracked support carrier of around 26 tonnes on composite rubber tracks, offered in four configurations covering containerised payloads, cargo with a loading crane, an enclosed command and rescue body, and a ground based air defence fit. Norway ordered it first and has taken vehicles since 2021, using it as the carrier for Kongsberg's NOMADS air defence system, and the Netherlands signed with Rheinmetall in December 2025 for 22 Skyranger 30 turrets on the same chassis. A recovery module for the wheeled Boxer, developed as a private venture with Krauss-Maffei Wegmann and shown at DSEI in 2019, carries a 20 tonne crane and can lift a mission module off a drive module. Technology Demonstrators is a separate line, where the PMMC G5 and a series of chassis rigs prove mobility, protection and drive concepts before any customer programme exists.

Modernizations is the older half of the business and the one that keeps a Bundeswehr relationship now past fifty years ticking over. FFG turns Leopard 1 hulls into bridge layers, bridge transporters, recovery and engineer vehicles, fascine carriers and minesweepers, and it is standardising 181 Wiesel 1 vehicles for the procurement office BAAINBw into three configurations, one carrying MELLS anti-tank missiles, one for reconnaissance and one with a 20 mm cannon. Overhaul, Customer Service and Logistics are sold as their own lines, covering vehicle systems, assemblies and manufacturing, with teams working in more than forty countries. Under PPP Projects the company staffs the army combat training centre at Altmark for Saab, with around forty people at Letzlingen keeping Wiesel, Leopard 2, Wolf, Fuchs and truck fleets available. Subsidiaries fill the edges. Jungenthal Wehrtechnik makes armoured hulls, GEKE Schutztechnik develops protection technology, Rexxon supplies air conditioning for rail and military vehicles, FFG Canada handles North American overhaul, and FFG Umwelttechnik builds suction and flushing bodies for civil trucks.