TKMS (thyssenkrupp Marine Systems)

TKMS, still widely known by its former name thyssenkrupp Marine Systems, is Germany's largest naval shipbuilder and one of Europe's biggest pure-play naval defense companies since it separated from its industrial parent and listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in October 2025. The company traces back to Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft and the old Blohm+Voss yard, and its two shipyards at Kiel and Wismar carry that heritage forward. Submarines are the core of the business. The HDW Class 209 has sold more than sixty boats to fourteen navies since the 1970s, making it one of the most widely exported conventional submarines ever built, and the newer Class 214 extended that design with air-independent propulsion for longer submerged endurance.

At home, TKMS is building the Type 212CD, a common design developed jointly with Norway that will equip both the German and Norwegian navies with six new boats apiece, and it has also floated an unmanned submarine concept called BlueWhale aimed at anti-submarine warfare missions. Surface ships run through the Blohm+Voss MEKO brand, a modular frigate and corvette family that has sold roughly sixty hulls to eleven navies worldwide, including the MEKO A-200 variant. For the German Navy directly, the company has built the Class 123 and 124 frigates, the newer Class 125, and the Class 130 corvette, and it is now under contract to build Tamandaré-class frigates for Brazil. Beyond new construction, TKMS runs a substantial through-life business, offering local production arrangements, integrated logistics support, and in-service support contracts so customers can maintain and upgrade vessels for decades after delivery rather than treating a warship sale as a one-time transaction.

That combination of design authority, export reach, and lifecycle support is what let thyssenkrupp's board argue the marine unit was worth spinning out as its own listed company rather than keeping it folded into a steel and industrial conglomerate. The IPO gave TKMS a market value of roughly four billion euros on debut and left it carrying an order backlog reported at close to nineteen billion euros, a reflection of how much Europe's naval rearmament since Russia's invasion of Ukraine has reshaped demand for both submarines and surface combatants. The company employs more than nine thousand people, with the largest concentration at the Kiel site, and continues to market its submarine and frigate designs actively into export markets in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America alongside its home orders from the Bundeswehr. Its combat systems and torpedo work, developed to integrate with its own hulls, rounds out an offering that spans design, construction, weapons integration, and sustainment under one roof.