John Cockerill Defense

John Cockerill Defense is the armaments arm of the Belgian engineering group John Cockerill, whose roots run back to an iron foundry opened at Seraing in 1817. For most of the past forty years the defense business was known for one product family, gun turrets for light armoured vehicles, sold quietly to armies across Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. That changed on 2 July 2024, when the company completed the purchase of Arquus from the Volvo Group. Arquus supplies roughly nine in ten of the wheeled vehicles used by the French Army, so the transaction turned a turret specialist into a builder of complete combat vehicles almost overnight. France and Belgium each took a 10 percent stake in John Cockerill Defense as part of the arrangement. The combined business set itself a target of one billion euros in annual turnover and around 2,000 staff by 2026, working from bases in Belgium, France, Italy, India and Saudi Arabia.

Weapons systems remain the technical core, spanning calibres from 25mm to 120mm. The best known are the 90mm CSE 90LP and the two-crew LCTS 90MP, both built for operators who want heavy direct fire on a light chassis, and the modular Cockerill 3000 Series, whose 3105 variant mounts a 105mm gun with an autoloader. That turret has had a visible few years. Ukraine has trialled it on rebuilt Leopard 1A5 hulls, and at EDEX 2025 the firm showed it fitted to refurbished M60 tanks. Lighter work falls to the Cockerill 1030, an uncrewed 30mm turret, and to the CPWS Gen 2 remotely operated station for 20mm to 30mm cannon. The Cockerill i-X is the house demonstrator, a low-signature vehicle concept used to argue where turret design is heading, and counter-drone effectors have been fitted to both it and the 1030. The Tank Boat X18 ATC puts the same gun technology on a shallow-water hull.

Arquus contributes the vehicles. Its range runs from the VLRA light all-wheel-drive family and the Sherpa 4x4 through the 6x6 VAB Mk3 armoured personnel carrier to the 14.5 tonne Fortress Mk2, with the modular MAV'Rx pitched as the platform designed to carry Cockerill weapon stations. A militarised heavy truck, the Zetros by Arquus, is built with Daimler Truck. Beyond whole vehicles, Arquus feeds driveline modules and the Hornet remote weapon station into the French Army's Scorpion programme, which covers the Griffon, Jaguar and Serval, and it runs fleet maintenance and remote troubleshooting for French users.

Simulation and training sit under the Agueris brand, merged into John Cockerill Defense France in January 2023, which builds motion-platform cabin simulators, trainers embedded inside real vehicles and virtual maintenance courseware. A live Cockerill 3105 cabin simulator appeared at Eurosatory 2024. Lifecycle management covers support to commissioning and in-service support. A smaller site securization unit sells counter-drone systems, electro-optical and infrared observation equipment, stereoscopic intelligent detection and biometric access management into industrial sites.