Thales will offer to buy the remaining Exail shares for €134 each, the company said on Monday. That’s a 44% premium to the Exail share price on June 25, the day before Safran announced talks with the Gorgé family at a price of €128.50 a share.

Safran said it ended exclusive negotiations on Friday about the potential acquisition after the parties were unable to reach mutually acceptable terms.

Exail provides maritime drones for several European autonomous mine-hunting systems, including the French program led by Thales. The market for mine warfare is expected to grow in the high single digits through to 2030, while the addressable market for unmanned anti-submarine warfare is forecast to increase eightfold by the end of the decade, Thales said in a presentation.

“With this acquisition, Thales aims to increase its scale in the underwater warfare market, and to expand its capabilities in inertial navigation systems through the addition of Exail’s complementary expertise,” the company said.

Thales said the acquisition allows it to gain critical mass in the growing market for unmanned mine countermeasures and speed up innovation in anti-submarine warfare. Exail produces a range of underwater and surface drones, as well as inertial navigation technology, with 76% of its sales coming from navigation and maritime robotics, and the remainder from advanced technologies.

Exail’s autonomous maritime drones are used for underwater mine clearing and seabed mapping, with emerging uses including anti-submarine warfare as well as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. Thales is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of sonar systems, including towed sonar used by many Western navies.

The purchase by Thales of the Gorgé family stake is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026, after which the company will file a mandatory tender offer for all of Exail’s shares and convertible bonds that is expected to close by early 2028 at the latest.

Thales said it expects “significant value creation” for its shareholders from the acquisition, with Exail adding to the company’s earnings per share from the first year, and an impact on Thales operating profit of more than €90 million by 2032.

Exail had 2025 revenue of €479 million, and an order book of €1.1 billion at the end of March, according to the presentation document. That compares with Thales sales of €22.1 billion last year, and an order book of €53.3 billion at the end of December.

Thales said the purchase will strengthen its underwater warfare business, allow it to gain market share in inertial navigation systems, and help accelerate development of quantum sensors. Combining the two companies could generate additional revenue of €500 million within 10 years, Thales said.

Fincantieri acquisitions

Meanwhile, Italian shipyard Fincantieri is spending €600 million to acquire four maritime drone and undersea engineering firms as it seeks to strengthen its role in the growing civil and defense undersea market.

The Italian state-controlled yard said it was buying firm Next Geosolutions, which offers offshore construction support services, as well as Italian start-ups WSense, Graal Tech and Defcomm which specialize in underwater communications and surface and undersea drones.

“The acquisitions announced today mark a historic transformation for Fincantieri, as it creates an international champion in the underwater domain,” the group’s CEO, Pierroberto Folgiero, said in a statement.

Supported by a €500 million capital increase in February, the acquisitions add to Fincantieri’s recent purchases of undersea firm Remazel and torpedo maker WASS.

Following the new acquisitions, Fincantieri’s sub-sea revenue will hit €1.1 billion this year, €1.4 billion in 2028 and €1.8 billion in 2030, the firm said.

Fincantieri said it would seek synergies between civilian and military sub-sea technologies, in the same way it has long sought synergies between its naval vessel and cruise ship businesses.

Following the acquisitions, Fincantieri will employ 1,500 in sub-sea activities in Italy, the Netherlands, the U.K., Norway and the United Arab Emirates, the firm said.

After overseeing rapid growth at the state-controlled firm following his appointment in 2023, Cingolani was released last month when the Italian government decided not to give him a second three-year mandate, surprising industry experts.

Instead the top job was given to Lorenzo Mariani, a former co-general manager at Leonardo and effectively Cingolani’s former number two, who moved a year ago to run MBDA’s Italian operation.

In an online press briefing on Wednesday “to say goodbye” to journalists, Cingolani recalled how Leonardo had added 20,000 staff and grown its share price from 10 to 64 euros on his watch.

Growth at the firm had been “unprecedented”, he said.

On Wednesday, Leonardo reported a 33% year-on-year rise in first-quarter core earnings.

Cingolani, 64, said the firm’s industrial plan was “rolling”, adding, “The strategy is built, capitalized and contracted. The job now is execution not strategy. Deviation from the plan could be detrimental to the success of Leonardo in the future.”

As an example of a new product roll-out, Cingolani cited the Michelangelo Dome, an air-defense system designed with open architecture to allow partner countries to link existing assets and make them interoperable.

The system will be tested in Ukraine against drone attacks in November, he announced.

Cingolani defended his “bullets and bytes” strategy which focused on turning Leonardo “from a defense company to a global security company” specializing in cyber, energy and infrastructure security.

Some experts have suggested that Cingolani fell out of favor in government circles because he was seen as not prioritizing the mass production of munitions and hardware needed as war rages on Europe’s border.

Cingolani however took pride in his focus on digitalizing operations at Leonardo. “We were a non-digital company. Now we have one terrabyte of memory per employee,” he said, adding, “We were creating a digital brand.”

Despite seeing his time at Leonardo truncated by the Italian government, Cingolani said he approved of government stakes in defense firms.

“I believe that you cannot consider a defense company to be 100 percent independent of the state,” he said. “If we pursue only profit and we are independent of public institutions we could decide to sell assets to an enemy country. A state stake in a defense company is justified in ensuring the firm behaves according to the alliances the state approves of,” he added.

“I might not be happy to not be renewed on the one hand, but on the other I understand the state supervises such a delicate issue as defense,” he said.

That said, Cingolani said he believed five-year rather than three-year mandates would be better at the top of Leonardo.

“Three years is too short because this is a mid-term or long-term strategy industry. It is not beneficial for the company. It could be beneficial to extend the mandate,” he said.

Asked why his mandate had not been renewed, Cingolani said, “It is not necessary that I understand. The state can do whatever is needed.”

He added, “Sometimes good results are not enough.”

During his mandate, Cingolani created alliances with Germany’s Rheinmetall and Turkish drone maker Baykar, helped by his friendships with top managers at the firms. Asked if those alliances could suffer due to his departure, he said, “There is a risk but a multi-national company like Leonardo cannot depend on an individual. Those alliances were facilitated by personal relationships built on shared knowledge, vision and strategy. Once that is written in the industrial plan and approved by the board it is no longer a personal point of view.”

He added: “Governance avoids a personalization of the company.”

Asked what he plans to do next, Cingolani said, “I am getting on my motorbike and will travel around Europe for a while.”

Clive Higgins, the CEO of Leonardo UK, said that online bot activity promoting the independence of Scotland from the UK reduced as Iranian authorities violently suppressed civil protest this month.

The implication is that Iran has been pushing the cause of Scottish independence through malign cyber activity in a bid to weaken the UK, but slowed its activity as violent protests raged in Iran.

“What has been very interesting over the recent period, given the social unrest in Iran, is the drop off in social media activity and chat bot activity focused on Scotland, elections and independence,” Higgins told Defense News.

On Sunday, Scotland’s first minister John Swinney said he would call for a referendum on Scottish independence if his SNP party wins a majority in Scottish parliamentary elections in May. At a referendum on independence held in 2014, 55% of Scots voted to stay in the U.K.

A report produced by the British parliament’s intelligence and security committee last July said the U.K. was a priority target for Iranian cyber attacks, ranking just behind the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.

“Iran has a high appetite for risk when conducting offensive activity and its intelligence services are ferociously well-resourced,” said committee chairman Kevan Jones at the time. He added, “It supplements this with its use of proxy groups – including criminal networks, militant and terrorist organizations, and private cyber actors – to provide it with a deniable means of attacking its adversaries with minimal risk of retaliation.”

Leonardo has been raising its profile as a cyber security provider, and Higgins said, “We are very clearly aware of the increasing threat from a cyber perspective and our capabilities monitor very regularly state actors who are mobilizing chat bots and social media accounts to disrupt the normal way of life we all enjoy.”

He added, “We are able to see very clearly the actions of state actors where we can identify IP addresses and other elements that articulate to us where things are being done, what kind of messages they are trying to deliver and how they are trying to disrupt U.K. society.”

He said, “There are three or four main state actors. We see a lot from North Korea, Iran, Russia and China. I don’t want to say that is state sponsored activity. It is where the activity derives from.”

British defense ministry official Group Captain Bill Sanders said the under-development platform needed to have a weapons bay ready to accept any armament used by the partners, by NATO and by the United States.

“Think about the lessons learned in Ukraine. As you go into a conflict you rapidly exhaust your stocks and you start to put pressure on the supply chain. What you want in that situation is the maximum ability to be able to dig into the other stockpiles and supply chains that are available,” he told Defense News on the sidelines of the International Fighter conference in Rome.

“Having a platform that can carry any NATO weapon, any U.S. weapon, any of the three nations’ weapons immediately gives the commanders in the theater flexibility,” added Sanders, who leads the UK’s Future Combat Air System (FCAS) Requirements and Concepting team which includes the GCAP program.

Sanders said another reason for weapons bay flexibility was the need to start carrying high-cost armaments at the start of a conflict to overcome enemy defenses – before needing to scale down to “dumb,” unguided bombs as those defenses became weaker.

“If we keep on using the most expensive weapons (throughout the conflict) the cost per kill, the cost per engagement is not sustainable. What we want to be able to do is start to pull apart the threads of the defensive system we are going against. We want to be in a situation where we can start to drop down the cost point of the weapons we are using,” he said.

With a flexible weapons bay, Sanders said “I can get the right weapon for the cost-per-kill ratio.”

Just as the GCAP needs to be able to use all weapons, it must be able to work with all drones known as Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), Sanders said.

“You have to be in a situation where, just like the weapons, the GCAP can work with what it finds. It’s no mean feat,” he said.

Analyst Douglas Barrie said building a fighter able to work with different CCAs was logical.

“I would expect the UK, Japan and Italy all have CCAs they ‘own’ which are sovereign capabilities they will use with GCAP. Whether they eventually coalesce around a shared platform is an interesting question but at the moment they seem to be going independently because it gives you more choice, more flexibility,” said Barrie, a senior fellow for military aerospace at the IISS think tank.

The dawn of the era of Collaborative Combat Aircraft was a recurring theme at this year’s International Fighter Conference.

Turkish officials discussed how they might match a CCA with the 20 Eurofighters Turkey agreed to purchase last month.

Jorge Tamarit-Degenhardt, CEO of the Eurofighter, said he was concerned that adapting the fighter to work with numerous CCAs picked by different customers could prove costly.

“Can we develop CCA integration in different configurations in different countries? We cannot do everything at the same time. We don’t have infinite resources,” he said.

“The combination is expected to generate mid triple-digit million-euro of total annual synergies on operating income five years after closing,” the firms added.

The new company, which has been in the pipeline for months, aims at boosting “Europe’s strategic autonomy in space, a major sector that underpins critical infrastructure and services related to telecommunications, global navigation, earth observation, science, exploration and national security,” the firms stated.

“This new company also intends to serve as the trusted partner for developing and implementing national sovereign space programs,” they added.

The firm should be operational by 2027, they said.

Airbus will take a 35% stake with Leonardo and Thales each taking a 32.5% stake, while the firm will operate “under joint control, with a balanced governance structure among shareholders,” the firms said.

Executives including Leonardo CEO Roberto Cingolani have spoken of the need for Europe’s space businesses to come together in the same way Airbus, Leonardo and BAE Systems have merged their missile activities in MBDA.

Airbus will insert its Space Systems and Space Digital businesses into the new firm, while Leonardo will contribute its Space Division, including its shares in Telespazio and Thales Alenia Space. Thales will contribute with stakes in Thales Alenia Space, Telespazio and Thales SESO.

Europe’s space businesses have long planned to ally after struggling to keep up with fierce competition from Elon Musk’s Starlink. But industry mergers have also faced opposition from European Union anti-trust officials who fear a concentration of power in the industry could stifle competition on the continent.

In their statement the firms said it was time for Europe to bulk up to take on competition from overseas. The new company, they said, would “Increase competitiveness facing global players, reaching critical mass and ensuring Europe secures its role as a major player in the international space market.”

Leonardo’s Cingolani, Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury and Thales CEO Patrice Caine, added, “This partnership aligns with the ambitions of European governments to strengthen their industrial and technological assets, ensuring Europe’s autonomy across the strategic space domain and its many applications.”

Meloni said Starlink offered advanced technology and, unlike European collaborative satellite program IRIS2, was ready.

“This is a European problem,” she said, adding the European Union “did not get there in time to have public technology able to secure this communication.”

Italy is in talks with Starlink, part of Musk’s SpaceX aerospace business, to use its 6,700 satellite constellation in a reported five-year, €1.5 billion ($1.55 billion) deal.

“Space X has illustrated to the government its technology that allows secure communication nationally and globally which means for us guaranteed communications with our diplomats and military missions abroad,” Meloni told reporters in Rome on Thursday.

She said no decision had been made, and that talks were also being held with other private operators, but said Space X had “the most advanced technology.”

She added, “There are no public alternatives.”

Meloni said, “Tomorrow there will probably be public entities able to guarantee the protection of communication. Today there are not.”

On Monday, Elon Musk said he was “ready to provide Italy the most secure and advanced connectivity.”

The European Union has signed to develop an array of 280 satellites known as ISIS2 which will offer encrypted satellite communications to governments, but it will not be ready until at least 2030.

Meloni said that she considered relying on a private operator to protect sensitive military data less than ideal, but could not wait for IRIS2.

“There are two scenarios and neither is optimal,” she said.

Fabiana di Porto, an expert on Innovation and Regulatory policy at Rome’s Luiss University, said, “Musk’s satellites are cheaper than IRIS2 and there are more of them, but the security aspect is important since we are talking about government communications in the hands of a private operator.”

She also pointed out that Italian state-controlled defense champion Leonardo had a stake in IRIS2.

Meloni said that Microsoft had previously worked on data centers in Italy, adding, “no-one complained.”

She said, “Is the problem with Space X that it is private, or is it the political ideas of Elon Musk?”

Handing control of Italy’s military satellite communications to the U.S. tech tycoon has prompted sharp criticism in Italy from opposition politicians given Musk’s recent use of his social media platform X to lambast governments in the U.K. and Germany.

Meloni has forged a friendship with Musk, recently calling him a “genius.”

“I value investments overseas through one lens – national interest – and not through friendships or political ideas,” she said, adding, “I have never talked to Elon Musk of this project.”

“We expect new navy vessels in ten years will be using a large number of drones and we want to be prepared,” said Capt. Gianluca Marcilli, who heads the Technology Innovation Office at the Navy General Staff’s General Space and Innovation Office (UGSI).

A new Navy research project called “Swarm Drone Carrier,” which was unveiled by Marcilli at a Rome conference this week, has focused on how numerous drones used for search and rescue, interception and interdiction missions can be hosted on ships and integrated with sensors and combat management systems.

Officials have meanwhile tasked Italy’s Fincantieri – the Navy’s go-to ship builder – to drum up designs for future drone-friendly vessels.

“We want to challenge Fincantieri to rethink designs in a way that we can use launch and recovery systems for aerial, surface and undersea drones,” Marcilli told Defense News.

“It means looking at how best to handle storage, maintenance and loading ammunition,” he said.

Marcilli said the study was based on the concept of a vessel being able to host between six and 10 undersea drones, able to be launched through apertures in the hull, rather than being launched with a crane.

The study also envisages four to six Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) drones on board, and has used Fincantieri’s SAND USV as a reference. Launched at Euronaval in 2022, the SAND (Surface Advanced Naval Drone) offers autonomy of up to 72 hours at eight knots.

The study proposed a typical airborne component of four to six drones, using as a reference the Hero, a 200kg rotary drone developed by Italy’s Leonardo.

The Navy is also looking at how to host fixed-wing, loitering munition on vessels, Marcilli said.

A major challenge officials face is integrating purchased drones with vessels’ highly classified Combat Management Systems, he added.

The study has led to the creation of a ‘proof of concept’ Landing Platform Dock design which could act as a drone carrier.

But Marcilli said the point of the study, and of Fincantieri’s involvement, was primarily to adapt vessels which are currently being built or planned.

That means figuring out how to better integrate drones into Italy’s under-construction Trieste Landing Helicopter Dock, which will also host the F-35B combat jet.

He said planners were also looking at Italy’s new PPX patrol vessels as well as two Fremm EVO vessels ordered last year from Fincantieri. The upgrades to Italy’s Fremm frigates are meant to offer enhanced capabilities for defeating drone attacks while operating their own drones.

In sharp contrast to stand-off jammers, which are placed on large aircraft out of harm’s way and take out enemy radars from long distance, Leonardo is launching a new “stand-in” jammer it claims will be small enough to fit on a drone and cheap enough to be expendable.

The BriteStorm, which the firm is showing off at the AUSA convention in Washington, will weigh about 2.5kg and occupy the space of six Coke cans, including transmit and receive modules and antenna, Leonardo managers have said.

“It can be at the leading edge of any forces going into an enemy area,” said Michael Lea, VP Sales Electronic Warfare, Leonardo UK.

Designed to be sufficiently affordable to be expendable, the package will fit on large quad-copters or winged UAVs heading into the battlespace, Lea said.

“It is priced in a way it can be treated as an attritable asset so it wont break the bank or cause a major strategic issue if shot down,” he said.

After receiving an enemy radar signal, the system uses Leonardo’s Digital Radio Frequency Memory (DRFM) technology to digitally capture the signal, process it and respond by jamming the radar with electronic noise or spoofing it, which could involve creating dozens of “ghost” fighter jet signatures.

It is the same DRFM technology Leonardo has used on its BriteCloud – an expendable countermeasure designed to be released from aircraft to disrupt incoming missiles’ radar guidance systems.

The BriteStorm uses up to three transmit-receive modules, which cover low, mid, and high wavebands.

After development at Leonardo’s Luton facility in the UK, the system has been test flown by the Royal Air Force’s Rapid Capabilities Office.

Leonardo believes the BriteStorm is a step beyond the Raytheon MALD, or Miniature Air-Launched Decoy, an air launched, expendable jamming missile which has reportedly been used in Ukraine.

It also beats a stand-off jammer, said Lea. “A stand off jammer’s position in the sky is predictable whereas a stand-in jammer operates closer to threats, has more maneuverability and more axes on which it can confuse and suppress the threat,” he said.

Leonardo had told unions in Rome that the plant at Grottaglie would need to shut down for four months to deal with a decrease in the usual amount of work performed for the 787 Dreamliner passenger.

Boeing told its staff in April it expected a slowdown in production and deliveries of the 787 Dreamliner because of a shortage of component supplies. The hitch followed quality issues that suspended deliveries for nearly two years, ending in 2022.

“Lower growth in the production and delivery of the Boeing 787 required a four-month plant shutdown to align production volumes with the short-term reduction in demand,” Leonardo said.

To fill the gap, Leonardo has started work at the facility on the wing of the new Eurodrone UAV — being built by a team of European governments and their local defense industries — and on the fuselage of the prototype of Leonardo’s remotely piloted Proteus helicopter.

Leonardo is also working on the fuselage of the VX4 electric aircraft at Grottaglie on behalf of the British firm Vertical Aerospace, the Italian company said, adding that the projects are employing 100 people.

Next, Grottaglie is to host the production of Leonardo’s AW609 tiltrotor, which the firm expects will be certified next year.

Built for civil customers with an eye on military applications, the AW609 is a long-term project that started life as a collaborative program with Bell before the U.S. business pulled out in 2011.

Leonardo said it is also focusing research work into new composite materials for aircraft at Grottaglie.

Leonardo has said delays at Boeing may cost it €50 million (U.S. $54 million) this year.

Bigger and faster than the aging Italian army AW129 Mangusta it is set to replace, and the only new attack helicopter now being developed in the West, the AW249 will be able to control unmanned aerial vehicles using large screens and helmet displays inspired by the F-35 combat jet.

“Because of the open architecture and our plan to keep it in service for at least 30 years, we are open to industrial collaboration to allow countries to become partners in the development of specific configurations, customizing equipment systems and localizing production for larger numbers,” a company spokesman told Defense News before Eurosatory.

Potential customers getting their industries involved could hail from Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Latin America, said the spokesman.

The plan recalls how Leonardo, then known as Finmeccanica, licensed the use of the baseline design of the AW129 to Turkey, which beefed up the helicopter and later sold its renamed T-129 to Nigeria and the Philippines.

But the spokesman said Leonardo’s approach was very different this time.

“We are not telling governments to take a baseline and develop their own, we are inviting customers to join us from an industrial perspective,” he said.

Weighing in at 8.3 tonnes, the new AW249 is nearly double the 4.35 tonne maximum take-off weight of its predecessor while its top speed of 155 knots (178 miles per hour) outstrips the 126 knots of the AW129.

“What we have kept is the agility, the maneuverability, while adding capabilities,” said the spokesman.

Armaments include guided and unguided 70mm rockets, air-to-air infrared guided missiles and air-to-ground radio frequency or fiberoptic guided missiles, while the AW249 pilot will be able to task UAVs, control their payload and view images they send.

Discussions on allowing the heliopter to control loitering munitions are underway with the Italian Army, which will be the launch customer for the AW249 with first deliveries in 2027.

Getting in step with fifth-generation technology, the helicopter will feature a 20-inch display for the pilot and co-pilot, with the choice of putting up video and data on the screen or on the helmet display.

Leonardo officials said pilots will be able to put a map up in their visor, but out of vision so it enters the pilot’s visor display when the pilot turns their head.

Swapping data between screen and helmet also applies to sensor fusion data, which is built using sensors including infra-red imaging, radar, LiDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging radar, a low light camera and satellite terrain images.

The platform is nearing readiness after Italian defense and Air Force officials became seriously interested in the coaxial rotor technology used on Lockheed Martin’s Defiant-X. That enthusiasm has now waned since the Defiant-X lost out in the US Army’s Future Long Range Assault Aircraft program (FLRAA) program in 2022, and then saw its next hope for adoption, the U.S. Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft program, cancelled.

That, according to Leonardo officials, vindicates the firm’s decision to stick with conventional designs like the AW249, while adding new capabilities.

“The U.S. decision reinforces our road map,” said the spokesman.

“Whatever industry decides to develop to meet national requirements that involves different architecture, the cancellation of FARA is moving it far to the right,” he said.