By: Robert Sterling – SeaPRwire – A factory announcement this size usually means more paperwork than production. Kongsberg just put $51 million on the table in northern Poland and set a hard date for mass output. That is not a press-release gesture. It is a concrete bet on local manufacturing for anti-drone systems that Poland now treats as urgent.
The official numbers are clear. On 13 October 2026, at the Warsaw Security Forum, Kongsberg said it will build a plant in the Pomerania region near the Tri-City of Gdansk, Gdynia and Sopot. Investment exceeds 200 million zloty, roughly 51 million dollars. Construction contract is due by the end of 2026. Work starts right after. Series production begins in the first half of 2028. At full load the site will create more than 100 long-term jobs. The plant will make and maintain the PROTECTOR series weapon stations, including the MCT30 turret. Those stations carry 35 mm, 30 mm or 12.7 mm guns and can fire interceptor drones plus 70 mm guided missiles. The missiles form the main punch of Poland’s SAN anti-drone system. Polish firm APS supplies the command network that links the batteries. Kongsberg has operated in Poland for over fifteen years. It already runs a naval strike-missile maintenance centre at the WZE plant and works with several local defence companies.
Set that against the real commercial move. Poland launched the SAN programme after roughly twenty Russian drones crossed its airspace one night in September 2025 while heading for Ukraine. Jets scrambled, some targets were shot down, major airports closed. The wake-up call produced a 15-billion-zloty contract, about 3.8 billion dollars, awarded to the Kongsberg-PGZ consortium. The package covers eighteen anti-drone batteries, fifty-two fire platoons, eighteen command platoons and around seven hundred vehicles. Delivery is supposed to finish within two years of contract signature. By putting a factory next to the Tri-City naval base and shipyard cluster, Kongsberg shortens the supply line for that order. It also positions the same line for export contracts that CEO Eirik Lie openly expects. He said the company has been in Poland for years, sees local facilities as important, and wants the new plant ready to serve European customers from Polish soil. The site sits west of Germany and east of the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. Logistics and politics both favour the choice.
This is how industrial maps shift in the defence sector. A Norwegian firm that already maintains missiles in Poland now adds a full production and support hub for the systems that guard bases, cities and critical infrastructure. Poland moves from pure buyer to host of the production line. Kongsberg folds another node into its global network. The first customer is the SAN programme. The next ones, if Lie is right, will be other European buyers who need the same mobile mix of guns, interceptors and guided missiles. The 2028 start date is the practical test. If the plant hits that window and feeds both the Polish order and early exports, the Tri-City location becomes a permanent piece of the European anti-drone supply chain. Dealers and programme managers watching the calendar now have a fixed point to measure against.
Author bio: Robert Sterling, a veteran operator with decades of hands-on experience building and scaling industrial and defence manufacturing networks across Europe and North America.