What “Winning Firm” Means in Regulatory Terms

European defence is increasingly organised as an institutional market shaped by law, not as an open commercial arena shaped only by price and performance. Access to demand, co-financing, and industrial scaling mechanisms now depends on whether a company fits a defined regulatory perimeter and can evidence that fit under procurement and audit conditions. The central question is therefore structural: which corporate configurations and product configurations remain continuously compatible with the eligibility, sovereignty, and supply-chain constraints embedded in EU instruments. This shift changes how value is assessed. A firm’s strategic relevance is no longer determined only by what it can build, but by whether it can be procured, scaled, and maintained under rules that prioritise European control, resilient supply chains, and restriction-free lifecycle autonomy. It also changes how risk should be understood. Some firms are excluded by hard constraints, others are conditionally admissible through tightly bounded safeguards, and some are reformable only where the texts explicitly provide transitional pathways. The purpose of the work that follows is to translate those legal mechanisms into testable conditions and reusable variables, so that investment screening, industrial due diligence, and procurement readiness can be assessed on a consistent, evidence-based basis.