VOP CZ, s.p.

VOP CZ opened in a former distillery near Novy Jicin in 1946, and the first vehicles through the doors were British Cromwell tanks. Nearly everything since has followed from that. The plant became the Czechoslovak army's heavy armour depot, repaired roughly 4,600 tanks across the T-34, T-54, T-55 and T-72 families, employed close to a thousand people at its 1980s peak, and was reconstituted in its present form as a state enterprise of the Ministry of Defence in 2012 after the Novy Jicin and Sternberk sites merged. It now runs more than 500 employees over about 40,000 square metres of production space at Senov and Bludovice, and it is the designated Czech industrial partner for the lifecycle support of army ground equipment.

Military production divides into tracked platforms, wheeled platforms and special modifications. On tracks, VOP CZ led the T-72M4 CZ modernisation, designing and delivering 30 rebuilt tanks between 2003 and 2005 together with the T-72M4CZ-W command version and three VT-72M4CZ recovery vehicles, and it still offers T-72 overhauls and BVP-2 repairs. Since 2026 it has maintained the Czech army's Leopard 2A4 tanks in cooperation with Rheinmetall. The biggest job on the floor is the CV90. VOP CZ is the lead Czech industrial partner to BAE Systems Hagglunds for 246 vehicles, running final assembly and programme management while developing a medical variant and an artillery observation post of its own design. On wheels it built and delivered 107 PANDUR II 8x8 CZ carriers in combat, command, two reconnaissance, medical and engineering versions, and it integrates tanker and drinking water transport vehicles on Tatra chassis for military airfields.

Special modifications is where the welding shop earns its living. The plant produced 450 armoured cabins for the NIMR AJBAN 440A between 2015 and 2017 for an Arab customer, and is currently building 130 armoured cabins for KNDS on the IVECO GTF3. The UGV TAROS V4 belongs to the same division, an autonomous robotic ground vehicle intended for perimeter monitoring of critical infrastructure and for carrying weapon payloads. Repairs and service, with the quality control function behind them, are treated as capabilities in their own right rather than as an afterthought to manufacturing. Civil engineering is the fourth leg and a genuine business rather than filler. VOP CZ mass produces steel weldments using six-axis CNC machining, laser, oxygen and plasma cutting, robotic and manual MIG, MAG and TIG welding and wet painting on semi-automatic lines, supplying global construction, material handling and agricultural machinery makers. It also sells its own DAPPER implement into construction, agriculture, municipal and gardening work, and puts roughly 8 percent of turnover back into new technology. Civilian cooperative production has run without a break since 1992, and earlier decades turned out forklifts, industrial crushers and airport boarding stairs still in use across Europe. The disposal side of the ledger matters too. Between 1992 and 1995 the enterprise scrapped roughly 1,300 T-54 and T-55 tanks drawn from Czech and Slovak arsenals.