Meopta - optika, s.r.o.

Meopta grinds glass in Prerov, a Moravian town where the company has been making optics since 1933. The site is enormous for a specialist optics house, roughly 140,000 square metres of industrial park holding an R&D centre, an optical division for elements and components, a mechanics division for precision machining and surface finishing, cleanroom system integration running from Class 10 to Class 100, and the administrative offices. Somewhere between 1,300 and 1,700 people work there depending on which year you count. The Rausnitz family, which had rebuilt the business after privatisation, sold it to Carlyle in 2023, and the company has been under that private equity ownership since. Products reach customers in more than fifty-five countries. Vertical integration is the point of the place, since Meopta melts, grinds, coats, machines and assembles rather than buying subassemblies in.

Three business areas share the plant. Industrial and OEM is the largest and the least visible, covering research and development, contract manufacturing, system integration and metrology for semiconductor lithography, medical imaging and industrial inspection customers. Some of the world's larger semiconductor equipment makers buy optical assemblies from Prerov, which is why the company appears in supply chain discussions well outside defence. Sport and lifestyle covers hunting and observation optics under the MeoStar, MeoPro and MeoTac names, a consumer business that also funds a lot of the coating and mechanical know-how the other divisions use. Defence is the third pillar and has grown fastest since 2022.

The military line splits between the individual soldier and the armoured vehicle. For soldiers, Meopta fields the MeoForce riflescope family in fixed and variable powers from DF 3x20 up to DF 5-30x56 and DF 6-24x56, aimed at designated marksman and sniper rifles, the MeoDot red dot and reflex sights in full size and micro formats for assault rifles and submachine guns, MeoBoost magnifiers that clip behind a red dot, the MeoNox night vision devices including the DF 3 Serval clip-on and the DF 1 Cougar monocular that will detect a human figure at nearly a kilometre, and MeoGuard binoculars and spotting scopes including a laser rangefinding variant. Vehicle optics are an older business, carrying day and night periscopes and sights such as the NV-3P night vision device, the BPK-3 and DND-5F combined day and night devices and the TKN-3BP commander's sight, the sort of equipment that keeps Soviet-pattern armour usable in European armies. Beyond its own brand, Meopta works as an OEM supplier of optical and optoelectronic components and subassemblies to larger defence primes, which is where a good deal of the defence revenue actually sits. Naval and air force optical systems round out the catalogue. Meopta describes its customers as including the largest global military contractors, and its output reaches more than fifty-five countries. It is a components business with a consumer shopfront attached.