A few workers hustle on the assembly line for Caesar gun trucks, production of which has been restarted after a year-long hiatus at the Arquus factory in Limoges. But the transition to a “war economy” that Emmanuel Macron calls for remains a distant horizon.
Tire installation, engine installation, preparation of the cabin which is then supported on the vehicle chassis: “Today, a Caesar leaves our lines every four days,” explains engineering director Christophe Bouny in front of four truck skeletons. in manufacturing process.
France, which supplied 30 Caesars to Ukraine, placed an order for a batch of 18 of these weapons produced by Nexter, but whose transporter truck is made by Arquus. Two more batches of 18 will be made in 2023 and that’s it. “It’s not much,” laments Emmanuel Levacher.
The head of the manufacturer wants to avoid this “stop and go” at all costs because “it is always a challenge to relaunch production”, reform operators and restart suppliers.
Arquus, a subsidiary of Sweden’s AB Volvo, is a major player in the Scorpion program that envisions the replacement of armored vehicles in the French military with interconnected vehicles. Further down the road at the factory, “mobility kits” for the Jaguar (cannon-equipped reconnaissance vehicles) and Griffon (troop carriers) armored vehicles, essential parts of the programme, are being built.
Arquus only produces the chassis and wheels of these latest generation vehicles, whose volumes have been revised downwards in the new military programming law (LPM) presented this Tuesday in the Council of Ministers. A hundred Jaguars less than the 300 planned for 2030 and about 500 Griffons transferred to post-2030, “this is not necessarily good news for us”, acknowledges Emmanuel Levacher.
But he hopes to catch up with the “operational maintenance” activity of the VABs and AMX-10RC whose service life will be extended. Vehicle maintenance and repair represent more than 40% of Arquus’ turnover. In 2022, the automaker produced 141 mobility kits for the Griffon and 25 for the Jaguar, but its production lines are not running at full capacity due to a lack of sufficient firm orders.
Although it built 1,272 new vehicles and received help from the Scorpion program last year, Arquus’s exports remain disappointing. With only 100 million euros of exports, the company is far from the goal of achieving half of its turnover -550 million euros- abroad.
Geopolitical changes, such as in sub-Saharan Africa, where France’s position is “challenged” – no more sales to Mali and Burkina Faso – do not make the task any easier, according to Emmanuel Levacher. And then “there is the rise of competitors like Turkey, South Korea, South Africa, Israel, who have a lot of influence. The Turks have very competitive prices because they have a government that places large orders on them,” he observes.
Last June, the French president called for a move to a “war economy” to prepare for the possibility of a high-intensity conflict after the invasion of Ukraine. A wish that remains to be fulfilled, says Emmanuel Levacher.
Source: BFM TV
