Defence Finance Monitor Digest #123 (Hidden Champions)
Defence Finance Monitor is building a comprehensive database that maps companies relevant to European strategic autonomy across the defence and dual-use sectors. With more than 1,300 European firms now systematically classified, the database is beginning to generate analytically meaningful results. Built on a proprietary methodology combining a closed taxonomy, structured scoring, and evidence-bound analysis, the dataset traces how institutional priorities translate into concrete industrial and technological dependencies.
At this level of coverage, it enables the systematic identification of the most critical bottlenecks affecting Europe’s defence and dual-use industrial base, together with the tier-2 and tier-3 hidden champions best positioned to address them. The emerging evidence indicates that Europe’s strategic autonomy is constrained less by prime contractors than by the intermediate layers of the supply chain, where specialised capabilities, production capacity, and control over key technologies are decisive.
Strategic Autonomy: Hidden Champions and the European PCB and Advanced Packaging Capability Gap
Technical analysis of the structural vulnerabilities across Europe’s electronics manufacturing base—especially in PCB production, advanced packaging, and critical interconnects—and of the strategic role played by specialised European “hidden champions” in strengthening hardware integrity, reducing non-allied dependencies, and supporting defence-relevant autonomy and industrial readiness through 2030.
Operational Mapping of European Hidden Champions for High-Attrition Drone Supply Chains
Technical de-risking map identifying Tier-2 and Tier-3 European suppliers capable of substituting Chinese-origin components across the FPV and low-cost drone Bill of Materials (BOM), with an emphasis on industrial feasibility, scalable procurement, and supply-chain resilience. It distinguishes components that are immediately substitutable from those that require industrial scaling, and from those constrained by upstream dependencies in semiconductors, magnets, sensors, and energy storage.
European Algorithmic Sovereignty: AI Integration, Software Fragmentation, and Europe’s Deep-Tech Firms
Technical assessment of Europe’s AI and software stack, identifying the main industrial bottlenecks across models, data, compute, integration, and secure deployment. The analysis maps the European deep-tech firms most relevant to mitigating these constraints and evaluates their strategic impact on auditability, interoperability, and resilience in defence-relevant systems. It focuses on the conditions required to translate technical capability into scalable, sovereign multi-domain autonomy.
Autonomous Flight Tech Stack: A Strategic Map of European Flight-Control and Autonomy Companies
This report models autonomous aerial systems as a layered technology stack—sensing and perception, guidance and flight control, mission autonomy, communications, and off-board control infrastructure—and explains why control of the flight-control layer is a decisive determinant of capability, safety, and industrial sovereignty. Building on this stack architecture, it identifies and maps European companies with strategic relevance at each layer, distinguishing core flight-control specialists, multi-layer avionics providers, and vertically integrated OEMs. The report then assesses how these firms contribute to Europe’s capacity to field autonomous systems under European-controlled design authority, certification pathways, and interoperability requirements, and it highlights where the ecosystem is robust, where it remains fragmented, and where critical gaps persist.
Without a structured map that connects doctrine, budgets and industrial capacity, strategy remains abstract, capital is misallocated, and industrial readiness drifts into reactivity rather than deliberate design.