Intracom Defense

Intracom Defense, usually shortened to IDE, began as the defence electronics activity of Intracom, the Athens telecommunications equipment manufacturer founded in 1977. The defence line started in 1992 and was spun into a standalone company in 2005. It is based at Koropi, on the road out to Markopoulo in the eastern Attica industrial belt, and describes itself as the leading Greek supplier of electronics, communications and hybrid energy systems for defence and security. Ownership changed in 2023 when Intracom Holdings sold roughly ninety-one percent of the shares to Israel Aerospace Industries in a deal valued near sixty million euros. IDE remained a Hellenic defence company bound by its Greek, NATO and EU obligations and classifications after the sale.

The company works in four areas. Tactical communications is the largest. WiSPRevo is the tactical communication and information system, TACTiCON the land tactical unified IP network and NAUTiCON its naval equivalent, and the wideband radio line covers WiWAN-CP and Se@NNet. The design intent across the range is a single IP-based network that carries voice, data and video across vehicles, ships and command posts rather than separate stovepiped radio nets.

Customised defence electronics is the oldest line and the one that built the company's export record. IDE produces missile telemetry units, missile data links, tactical terminals and hardware modules as a subsystem supplier to larger missile houses. That work started in the 1990s through partnerships with Raytheon and Diehl, and the company has been an industrial participant in the Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile programme and in the IRIS-T air-to-air missile. Through the 2000s IDE added vehicular and wideband military communications and built supplier relationships with Krauss-Maffei Wegmann, Rheinmetall, Saab and General Dynamics UK, which carried its equipment into Finland, Germany, Indonesia, Lithuania, Sweden and the UK.

Hybrid power systems became a distinct line from around 2013 and are now one of the company's more distinctive offerings. The range includes tactical hybrid generators, hybridisation and energy storage systems for vehicles and installations, and GENAIRCON, which combines vehicle power supply, power management and environmental control in one unit. The point of the line is reducing generator run time and fuel demand at forward positions, an argument that has found buyers well beyond Greece. First exports of hybrid power equipment to Israel were made in 2020.

The fourth area is security solutions, covering land and border surveillance, maritime and coastal surveillance, critical infrastructure protection, a maritime interdiction operation suite and unmanned systems integration. These are integrated offerings that pull together the company's own communications and power products with sensors and command software.

IDE has accumulated more than a billion euros in exports over two decades, which is a large figure relative to the size of the Greek defence industrial base and reflects a business built on being a subsystem supplier inside other people's programmes rather than a platform prime. The acquisition by Israel Aerospace Industries was framed by both sides as a route into European programmes for IAI and a route into a larger group's supply chain for IDE.