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Wah Industries Limited Contracts Turkish Company Repkon for Artillery Shell Factory
On 21 November, Pakistan’s Wah Industries Limited (WIL) signed an agreement with the Turkish defence contractor Repkon to set up an ammunition body production and filling line at WIL’s facilities for 155 mm artillery shells. This new facility will be able to manufacture 120,000 artillery shells per year.
Repkon is an industrial systems company that supplies machinery for aerospace, oil and gas, automotive, and petrochemical industries. The company also carries out its own original R&D to “develop strategically important technologies” for Turkiye across both defence and civilian sectors.
WIL was established in 1958 as a commercial subsidiary of Pakistan Ordnance Factories (POF), which is the country’s primary manufacturer of small arms, small arms ammunition, and artillery shells.
While WIL markets and sells some POF goods to the domestic civilian market, its work has expanded into numerous products for industrial uses, such as steel, gases, and explosives, among others.
This new agreement with Repkon suggests that WIL is directly entering the defence industry as a vendor of artillery shells. Granted, WIL does manufacture small arms ammunition, but those can be marketed to civilian and defence buyers alike. Artillery shells, on the other hand, are purely defence applications.
Traditionally, POF had managed Pakistan’s defence ammunition needs, especially artillery shells as well as artillery rockets. This shift towards WIL adding capacity may suggest that POF could be reorganizing by potentially offloading more defence-oriented work to WIL.
A Sign of Contract Manufacturing for Other Companies?
Several factors could be driving POF to offload artillery shell production work to WIL.
First, the global demand for artillery shells, especially in the backdrop of the Russia-Ukraine War, has significantly gone up. Ukraine reportedly fires 5,000 to 6,700 shells per day, which automatically makes Kyiv the foremost potential buyer of any net-new shell production. Moreover, Ukraine’s ongoing need for artillery shells likely depleted existing Western European stocks, prompting those countries to also look across both domestic and foreign sources for products.
In this context, the new WIL facility will add to the global supply chain of artillery shells, thereby sharing the burden for Ukrainian and Western ammunition needs alike.
Second, Pakistan is one of Ukraine’s ammunition contractors. In 2022, Pakistan signed a $364 million US deal with Global Military and Northrop Grumman to supply artillery shells, some of which were sent to the frontlines in Ukraine. However, the Ukrainians had complained about the quality of Pakistani ammunition (unclear if they were referring to shells or rockets)…
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