Sako Ltd

Sako began in 1921 as a repair shop for the Finnish Civil Guard, patching up rifles in a country that had been independent for four years. The name is a contraction of Suojeluskuntain Ase ja Konepaja, the Civil Guard Firearm and Engineering Works. A century on, the Riihimaki plant machines barrels, actions and cartridge cases under one roof and sells into three markets that rarely share a factory: hunting, sport shooting, and defence and law enforcement. Beretta Holding bought the company in 2000, and Sako now sits alongside Benelli and Steiner inside Beretta Defense Technologies.

Hunting is the volume business. The Sako 90 carries the classic controlled feed bolt action into the current catalogue, including the Finnlight configuration built for hunters working in wet cold, while the Sako 100 is a switch barrel design aimed at travelling hunters who want one rifle in several calibres. The S20 splits the difference with a modular chassis that converts between a hunting and a precision configuration. Under the Tikka brand, which Sako has owned since 1983, the T3x centrefire and the T1x rimfire have become the default accurate rifle in a lot of European gun cabinets, and the Quad remains the switch calibre rimfire in the Sako line.

Sport shooting and sniping run together on the same machines. The TRG family is the sharp end, a bolt action platform that turns up in police marksman units and army sniper sections across Europe, and target versions of the Tikka T3x compete in the same disciplines. The TRG platform has been in service long enough that spares chains and training pipelines already exist inside several European forces. Sako also loads its own ammunition, from hunting cartridges through match grade rounds such as the TRG Sport line, which is unusual for a rifle maker and hands the defence side a controlled supply of the exact load a rifle was zeroed with. Accessories, mounts and spares are sold against both brands.

Defence and law enforcement work has picked up sharply. The Finnish Defence Forces signed for the Rifle System M23 in January 2022, a family of semi automatic 7.62 NATO weapons on an AR10 pattern covering a sniper rifle and a designated marksman rifle, worth about ten million euros including accessories, spares, maintenance equipment and training. In March 2023 Finland and Sweden signed a joint framework agreement at the Riihimaki factory for a shared range of small arms, with the Swedish variants entering service under the AK 24 designation. Sako has been at this a long time. It built the RK 95 TP assault rifle for the Finnish Army, and through its absorption of Valmet's firearms operation it carries the lineage of the RK 62 that Finnish conscripts have carried since the 1960s. The ARG family extends the same customer base with an AR pattern rifle. Manufacturing for the M23 stays at Riihimaki, which was part of the point of the contract, and membership of Beretta Defense Technologies gives Sako a sales network a Finnish rifle maker would struggle to build alone.