MESKO S.A.

MESKO has been making ammunition at Skarzysko-Kamienna since the National Ammunition Factory opened there in 1924, two years after the enterprise was founded. Scale came later, and so did missiles. Under communism the plant swelled to roughly 22,000 people and turned out bicycles, meat grinders, juice extractors and street lighting alongside cartridges, which is why the name still carries a consumer echo in Poland. Today the company belongs to Polska Grupa Zbrojeniowa and is the country's single most important source of both small arms ammunition and guided missiles, working from Skarzysko-Kamienna with further plants at Pionki, Krasnik, Nowa Deba, Bolechowo and Bydgoszcz.

Rockets and missiles are the segment that puts MESKO into export conversations. The PIORUN very short range air defence missile, successor to the shoulder-launched GROM, has gone to the Polish Armed Forces and to Ukraine, and it is the product most often used to explain the company abroad. The PIRAT light anti-tank guided missile and Polish licence production of the Spike-LR sit in the same line, with guidance and electronics work shared with Telesystem-Mesko. Air-launched weapons follow the same pattern: the NLPR-70 unguided 70 mm rocket, the WW-15 multi-tube helicopter launcher that fires it, and the 122 mm M-21 FHD Feniks rocket for GRAD-type launchers, which reaches around 41 km against fortifications, equipment and personnel. Telesystem-Mesko, a partner company, builds the seekers and guidance electronics behind GROM, PIORUN, PIRAT and precision artillery ammunition, which keeps the most sensitive part of the missile business inside Poland rather than under an import licence.

The ammunition catalogue is broader than the missile one and far less visible. Small caliber ammunition covers 9x18, 9x19, 5.56x45, 7.62x39, 7.62x51, 7.62x54R and 12.7x99 in ball, tracer, armour-piercing, sniper and blank loadings. Medium caliber ammunition runs 20x102, 23x152, 30x173 and 35x228 with APDS-T, APFSDS-T, FAPDS-T and multipurpose natures. Mortar ammunition, tank ammunition in 120 mm and 125 mm including armour-piercing fin-stabilised and high explosive rounds, and artillery ammunition in 122 mm, 152 mm and 155 mm with modular propellant charges complete the range. Behind all of it sits vertical integration that most European ammunition makers let go: propellant powder and high-energy components from Pionki, cartridge cases, primers and projectiles from Krasnik. Project 400, an investment of about 466.7 million zloty, lifted small caliber capacity fivefold from 50 to 250 million rounds a year, roughly a million rounds every working day, with most inputs now sourced inside Poland. Propellant technology transferred from the Czechoslovak Group has been installed at Pionki to widen that feedstock base further. Services close the loop with demilitarization of surplus stock and contract engineering work including forging machine capacity, and ammunition components leave the Krasnik plant for other manufacturers as well as for MESKO's own lines. The pattern across all of it is the same. Poland decided it wanted to make its own ammunition and its own missiles, and this is the company carrying most of that decision.