Kongsberg Gruppen

Kongsberg Gruppen's roots reach back to 1814, when Norway's parliament set up a state-owned weapons factory in the town of Kongsberg to arm the newly independent country. The company still carries the town's name, and the Norwegian state, through the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Fisheries, still holds just over half its shares, even though it has traded on the Oslo Stock Exchange since 1993 under the ticker KOG. The defense side of the business, Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace, is best known outside Norway for two missile families that have become NATO standards. The Naval Strike Missile is a sea-skimming anti-ship weapon now fitted to ships and coastal batteries across a growing list of navies, and its air-launched cousin, the Joint Strike Missile, was developed to fit inside the F-35's internal weapons bay, a design constraint few other missile makers have solved.

KDA also builds the NASAMS air defense system jointly with Raytheon, the system now most visibly protecting Kyiv's skies, along with the Protector remote weapon station used on vehicles from dozens of countries and a CROWS variant built for the US Army. It runs the Penguin anti-ship missile lineage and, more recently, has been developing longer-range strike weapons including the 3SM Tyrfing program. Kongsberg Maritime, the group's oldest continuously operating commercial line, supplies the merchant shipping industry with dynamic positioning systems, navigation electronics, and propulsion equipment, and is a major supplier of the sensors and control systems that keep offshore vessels on station. A related business, Kongsberg Discovery, spun out to focus specifically on ocean sensing and autonomy, builds sonar systems and the HUGIN and MUNIN families of autonomous underwater vehicles used for seabed mapping, mine countermeasures, and subsea inspection work by navies and commercial operators alike.

Kongsberg Digital rounds out the group as its software arm, building simulation, digital twin, and data platforms originally developed for the maritime and energy industries and increasingly sold into defense training and space applications. A smaller Space unit works on satellite ground systems and space-qualified electronics. Kongsberg has grown fast on the back of European rearmament since 2022, expanding its defense order backlog and its missile production capacity in Norway to meet demand from Ukraine-related orders and NATO allies restocking their own inventories. With close to 15,000 employees and revenue of roughly 49 billion Norwegian kroner in 2024, it has become one of Europe's more important second-tier primes, small next to Rheinmetall or BAE Systems but increasingly central to NATO's precision-strike and air-defense supply chains.