Repkon Makine ve Kalip Sanayi ve Ticaret A.S.

Repkon is a metal forming machine builder from Sile, on the Black Sea edge of Istanbul, founded in 1978 and still privately held. For most of its life it sold machines rather than weapons. Flow forming, hot spinning, shear forming and hydraulic presses are its four machine families, and the customers were automotive wheel and leaf spring makers, LPG cylinder plants, oil and gas fabricators, and petrochemical and mining customers who need fire suppression tanks and pressure vessels. The defence business grew out of the same physics. Flow forming squeezes a metal preform over a mandrel with rollers until it becomes a thin walled cylinder, which is exactly the shape of an artillery shell, a rocket motor case and a gun barrel, and Repkon patented its own free flow forming variant of the process.

That put the company at the centre of the Western scramble to rebuild artillery ammunition capacity after 2022. Repkon sells turnkey production lines for 105 mm, 152 mm and 155 mm projectiles, along with lines for rocket bodies and for drag bombs, and it exports flow formed barrels in several calibres. General Dynamics selected Repkon equipment for new United States 155 mm projectile capacity, and the American subsidiary Repkon USA set up lines at Mesquite, Texas that were meant to reach 30,000 shells a month. That programme has been difficult. Reporting in 2026 found the Texas plant had yet to deliver a usable shell despite very large sums committed, a reminder that transplanting a process is not the same as owning one. The company kept expanding regardless. Repkon USA won a sole source United States Army contract worth up to 435 million dollars for the first new domestic TNT plant since the 1980s, and in 2025 it bought General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems' Garland, Texas operation, the only American source of MK-80 series bomb bodies. A production line for 155 mm ammunition in Pakistan and a joint venture with the Australian cold spray firm Titomic for barrel manufacturing extend the same model into other markets.

Since about 2023 Repkon has also sold finished weapons under a Repkon Defence banner, which moves it from supplying the toolmakers to competing with their customers. The RDS40-AGL is a 40x53 mm high velocity automatic grenade launcher of blowback design with a redesigned sight, top cover and belt feed, and it has been seen with Ukrainian assault units as well as reported in delivery to Turkish forces. The RDS40-MGL is a drum fed multiple grenade launcher, the RDS37/38-MAR a less lethal gas launcher for police work, and the RDS127-HMG a 12.7x99 mm heavy machine gun with a quick change barrel that can go on a tripod or into a turret. Ammunition racks for armoured vehicles round out the catalogue. The whole structure is unusual, since very few companies sell both the machine that makes the round and the gun that fires it. Customers for the machines are often state arsenals that would rather own a capability than sign a supply contract, and the weapons business gives Repkon a way to show that its own processes produce hardware that survives field use. The two halves reinforce each other.