On 23 November and 20 December 2023 the Direction générale de l’armement notified MBDA of orders for 1,300 Akeron MP and 329 Mistral 3 missiles, for a total exceeding €300 million, and the French Ministry of the Armed Forces statement, reproduced by MBDA named ASB Aerospatiale Batteries of Bourges among the industrial contributors to both programmes. Set against the prime contractor’s own scale, that order is a small fraction of the demand now moving through the chain: MBDA recorded revenue of €5.8 billion in 2025, order intake of €13.2 billion and a backlog of €44.4 billion, states that missile production doubled between 2023 and the end of 2025, and plans a further 40% production rise in 2026 alone. ASB’s disclosed scale is of a different order, and only partly disclosed at all: its Scottish subsidiary reported turnover of £23.098 million for 2024 in its Annual Report for the year ended 31 December 2024, while the group’s own website still labels its revenue figure as 2020. The structural constraint sits between those two magnitudes. A thermal battery is qualified to a configuration rather than sold as a commodity, so a supplier’s position is set by design authority, qualified process and accepted output, none of which appears in an order value or a missile count. What the public record does not settle is whether the expansion visible around ASB creates a second source for these two missiles, or only a second place where one controlled process is run.