New EDGE Group CEO says 2024 is the ‘year to catch up’ on deliveries, talks missile integration

WORLD DEFENSE SHOW 2024 — Just a week after being appointed the top executive for UAE’s defense giant EDGE Group, Hamad Al Marar told Breaking Defense that he expects the company will reach export revenues of $1 billion in 2024 as the Emirati conglomerate pursues a bevy of international deals.

“This year for us is a year to catch up on our deliveries, our commitments, whether that is a delivery of a solution, or a development,” Al Marar said at the World Defense Show. Al Marar lauded the $1 billion figure, thought it’s drop from what he said was $2 billion in export revenues in 2023, a huge chunk of that came from a single, over-$1 billion deal with the Angolan navy.

EDGE made a significant showing at the World Defense Show, hosted by the Emirate’s Gulf neighbor Saudi Arabia. At the UAE’s national pavilion, EDGE and its subsidiaries displayed a number of platforms, including an upgraded JAIS armored vehicle that is the subject of the first defense production agreement between the UAE and KSA companies.

At the show, Al Marar, who previously was head of the missiles and weapons division at EDGE, discussed the company’s recent push to integrate EDGE weapons on foreign aerial platforms, revealing a new effort to put subsidiary Al-Tariq P3 and newer P5 missiles on Turkish firm Baykar’s AKINCI unmanned aerial vehicles.

“[The] AKINCI deal [with the] UAE was sealed, and EDGE will be integrating the weapons. This is an offering on the Baykar platforms, so actually whatever we do is going to go hopefully to other markets,” he said.

That appears to be an expansion of an initiative EDGE announced on Jan. 17, to work with Baykar to arm the Bayraktar TB2 UAVs with EDGE’s DESERT STING 16 “precision-guided munitions.”

Al Marar said missile integration testing will happen both in the UAE and in Turkey, with “physical aspects of integration” likely done in the UAE.

Al Marar also noted that teams have “started meetings” about how to put EDGE missiles on US-made MQ-9B UAVs, a few months after General Atomics announced that plan.

“The studies that are being conducted now will quantify the effort towards the timeline, and the timeline then will be determined,” Al Marar added.

RELATED: Separate from F-35, Emirate’s MQ-9B SeaGuardian deal moving ‘forward,’ exec says

EDGE also plans to find a home for its missiles on French Rafale fighers and Indian Tejas jets, after Al Marar said EDGE has already put them on Mirage 2000 fighters belonging to the UAE air force.

Discussing integrating missiles on the Tejas, Al Marar said that “platform alone doesn’t sell without armament. We [have] actually joined forces there to be part of their initial offering on the platform.”

“The Rafale is a condition of purchase,” he said. “In the end we have our indigenous weapons. They weren’t reluctant, [but] actually they welcomed it and to become part of the offering [as well].”

EDGE Group has been focusing heavily on purchasing firms internationally and locally, but Al Marar said the aim is not to spread so large that EDGE becomes the sole distributor to the armed forces.

“Not at all. We are trying to play the guardian role between the [Ministry of Defence] and the ecosystem [of] small to medium enterprises. We understand we cannot expand forever. We want to remain as a designer and system integrator, and we would like to outsource into the ecosystem,” he said.

Breaking Defense previously reported on EDGE’s international expansion, especially into Brazil. The company’s newly appointed CEO concluded that Latin America and East Asia will remain hot markets for the firm in the future.