Armored vehicles sit on display at the stand for NIMR, a subsidiary of the Emirati defense conglomerate EDGE Group, at the World Defense Show in Riyadh in 2024. (Agnes Helou / Breaking Defense)
WORLD DEFENSE SHOW 2024 — Emirati armored vehicle maker NIMR debuted the second generation of its JAIS armored vehicle, dubbed JAIS Mark 2 or Mk2, at the World Defense Show in Saudi Arabia, where the company has agreed to help produce some of the vehicles with Saudi Arabia’s SAMI defense firm.
“With reference to our collaboration with NIMR, the program that we announced earlier is on track. It’s progressing exactly as planned,” Saudi Arabian Military Industries (SAMI) CEO Walid Abukhaled told Breaking Defense Thursday. “Actually, we have one of the NIMR vehicle here in our booth, demonstrating how we’re integrating our systems into that vehicle. So the project is progressing as planned.”
NIMR, which is owned by Emirati defense conglomerate EDGE Group, and SAMI originally teamed up back in 2021 with hopes of jointly producing the armored vehicle, but in 2022 the two decided that NIMR would license the production to SAMI to be produced locally, NIMR CEO Abri du Plessis told Breaking Defense.
“As we stand today, we have an active license agreement with them and this is what we’re pushing for,” du Plessis said. “So we are together with them still marketing the product. The next step would be when we get a contract for the vehicles that we started transfer of technology and transfer production, with the end goal of SAMI being completely independent to manufacture the vehicle, but of course, they will be at the transition period.”
Du Plessis described the current arrangement as NIMR first sending “fully built units back from home” in the UAE to SAMI, and then gradually providing SAMI material for the company to build more of the vehicles on their own until eventually they hit an “end goal” of “complete local production.”
He added that the intellectual property (IP) will be given over to SAMI for localization, but it will “also remain in the UAE.”
As for the JAIS Mark 2 (Mk2), Du Plessis said it already received its first contract from an international customer, but he declined to say who that was.
“The development [of the vehicle] that we started three years ago is now complete, and the vehicle is fully industrialized and in production as we speak. They’re coming off the production line in Abu Dhabi,” Du Plessis said.
Earlier this week Abukhaled, SAMI’s CEO, told Breaking Defense that his firm has a big focus on building factories in the Kingdom, making a 1 billion riyal investment in a land systems center of excellence for any vehicle.
Du Plessis said he expects SAMI to soon break ground on a vehicle production factory and said that JAIS “should be part of it.” He said expected it would like be between a year and a year-and-a-half before production started in the Kingdom.
Du Plessis said that JAIS Mk2, also, will be fully produced in KSA eventually, and suggested other projects could follow.
“We are actively looking at collaborating with SAMI on any other opportunities. And in fact, we are marketing AJBAN [armored internal security vehicles] also locally, and I think there’s a very good opportunity that they can also realize in the future, because it’s a vehicle for which there is a niche in the market here. So we are constantly in contact with SAMI to further explore opportunities,” he added.
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