In mid-May 2017 Oman Ammunition Production Company, created by decision of the Sultan in 2011, delivered its first cartridges from a plant built to make small- and medium-calibre ammunition. The plant had been equipped by Manurhin, a small company based in Mulhouse, under a contract won at the end of 2013 that also provided for the training of local engineers from the design of the project to its completion. The French embassy’s economic service valued the contract at €70 million, the largest in the company’s history, and put the plant’s capacity at 94 million cartridges a year. The case shows what a specialist machine-maker sells: not only presses and assembly machines, but the engineering, documentation and training that turn a building into a production line. That matters to Europe now, as governments pay for new ammunition capacity and have to decide what they acquire when they pay for machinery. Manurhin’s business passed in 2018, through a court-supervised sale, to a defence group owned by the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and continues under the name Manufacture du Haut Rhin, and registry summaries of the company’s accounts show turnover in 2024 roughly half that of 2023. Its offer, its ownership and its finances raise a question that budget figures do not answer: when a state or a manufacturer buys production machinery, how much of the capability to run, maintain and adapt the line does it acquire, and how much stays with the supplier?