Glock GmbH

Gaston Glock set up his firm at Deutsch-Wagram, outside Vienna, in 1963, and spent the first two decades making door fittings, curtain rails and plastic and steel components. Military work came next. Through the 1970s the company supplied the Austrian Army with machine gun belts, hand grenade bodies, field knives and entrenching tools, which is how it learned polymer moulding and metal treatment at scale and how it got to know the procurement office. When Austria issued a pistol requirement in the early 1980s, Glock had never designed a firearm. The Glock 17 that came out of that effort won the trial and an initial order of 30,000 in 1983, entering service as the P80. The company remains private, held through the Glock Privatstiftung, with no outside investors. Manufacturing runs from Deutsch-Wagram and a second plant at Ferlach in Carinthia that opened in 1987, and Glock Inc. was set up at Smyrna, Georgia in 1985 as the first overseas subsidiary.

The pistol range is where almost all of the money is, and it splits by market rather than by design. Full-size and compact duty pistols such as the G17, G19, G45 and G49 go to armies and police forces, and the same guns in the same calibres sell across the counter to civilians in the United States and Europe. The Glock 18, a selective-fire machine pistol firing at 1,100 to 1,400 rounds a minute, is sold only to military and law enforcement buyers. US special operations forces carry the Glock 19 Gen4 MOS as the Mk 27 Mod 2, and the FBI adopted the 17M and 19M in 2016. Purely commercial lines include the subcompact G26, the single-stack Slimline G43, G43X and G48, the .380 G42, the .22 rimfire G44 and the long-slide competition G34. Calibres run across 9x19 mm, .40 S&W, 10 mm Auto, .45 Auto, .45 GAP, .357 SIG, .380 Auto and .22 LR. Six generations have now shipped, the latest announced in December 2025 with a new optic mounting deck that screws sights straight to the slide and an A-CUT interface built with Aimpoint for the COA sight.

The rest of the catalogue is small but it is the part that predates the pistols. Glock still makes the field knives, balanced for throwing and offered with a saw back, and the entrenching tool that locks in three positions to work as a shovel or a spade. Magazines use a steel insert encased in polymer. Accessories cover tactical lights, holsters, sights and slide options, and there is an apparel and merchandise line alongside. Training pistols in marking-cartridge configuration support law enforcement instruction, and armourer courses come with the contracts. A V Series announced at the end of 2025 hardens the design against illegal full-auto conversion devices, a problem that has lately been shaping police purchasing in the United States. What is public is the shape of the business. A single mechanically simple design, made in two Austrian plants, sold to police, soldiers and private buyers on much the same terms.