The United Arab Emirates’ principal defense company is eyeing partnerships to realize its engine and space ambitions.
aviationweek.com
The United Arab Emirates is throttling up efforts to expand its defense industrial portfolio with the launch of the Powertech business, which aims to develop and field domestically produced engines to power everything from homegrown missiles to uncrewed combat aircraft.
Setting up Powertech is the latest twist in Edge Group’s five-year effort to become a major defense equipment supplier through acquisitions, partnerships and local efforts. About a year ago, the company realized that without controlling its fate on engines, it would never achieve the ultimate goal of self-reliance.
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“For us, propulsion systems—from piston engines to microjets to medium-size jets to large turbofan, turbojet propulsion systems—are our destiny,” Khaled Al Zaabi, Edge’s president of platforms and systems, told Aviation Week at the IDEX defense show, held here Feb. 17-21. “Because unless we control that or work with partners that enable us to be able to design and develop them, we will never really be taken seriously in terms of delivering our own capabilities.”
The push also represents perhaps the most challenging hurdle the company is tackling, given problems other countries have faced in trying to establish autonomous propulsion capabilities. “We’re going into this with very wide eyes, wide open,” Al Zaabi said. “We know this is not an easy journey.”
Edge wants to be in the full value chain, from single-crystal turbine blades to high-pressure turbine disks and fan blades. While Powertech aims to cover a broad thrust range—up to around 35,000 lb.—it does not intend to take on leading aircraft engine-makers, such as GE Aerospace or Rolls-Royce.
Edge Chairman Faisal Al Bannai says Powertech was established after the company recognized during the first few years of building products and expanding sales that critical components still were missing.
The company may pursue different paths to introduce other product types and is not ruling out acquisitions. “Some propulsion systems we may choose to fully develop in-house because we can,” Al Zaabi said. “Some propulsion systems might not make sense for us to fully develop in-house, either from a capability point of view or from an economical point of view.”
Edge has signed agreements with several potential strategic partners to explore opportunities for engine co-development, Al Zaabi said, and the company expects to finalize some in the next few months. Those partnerships could lead to joint ventures that develop their own intellectual property to address Edge’s needs initially but eventually go after business abroad, he said.
The partnership approach also underpins Edge’s space strategy. Its new space unit, FADA, launched in September, is likely to name an industrial partner for a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite system in the coming weeks and for an electro-optical constellation later.
Edge plans to start deploying the SAR system, Sirb—Arabic for “a flock of birds”—toward the end of 2026 and the electro-optical system with submeter resolution in 2027, Waleid Al Mesmari, president of space and cybertechnologies, said at IDEX. The company also wants infrared-imaging spacecraft.
FADA is looking for overseas industrial partners to build local expertise gradually in the UAE in order to develop satellite design and manufacturing capabilities in the country. Al Mesmari said the unit also is working with local partners, in particular the government-funded Technology Innovation Institute, to infuse large language models into its data analytics tools, among other efforts. While the core goal is to foster indigenous capacity, FADA plans to offer services to foreign customers as well.
The 10-year plan for the space unit, Al Mesmari said, is “to have a fully vertically integrated company that focuses on upstream capabilities, which [are] satellites and payloads; to have midstream capabilities, which focus on the manufacturing and the operation of the satellites; and to have ground station capabilities, which will help in Earth observation, space situational awareness and space domain awareness.”
Launchers are absent from FADA’s near-term plans. Al Mesmari noted that the company does not want to focus on too many things, but he added, “We are not eliminating that option.”
Al Bannai signaled that he has been happy with Edge’s early growth period, noting that the company could top its ambition of securing up to 40% of deals from abroad. When the company was set up, only about 2% of its business came from overseas. That grew to 35% last year. “If we do close some of the deals we’re expecting to close this year, it could go to 50% or beyond 50% of our orders,” Al Bannai said.
The customer base has been broad, he noted, with sales coming from the Middle East, Asia, Europe and Latin America. Only the U.S. remains a blank for deals.