Elta lands $110 million deal from Czech Republic for radar support services
Elta lands $110 million deal from Czech Republic for radar support services
The new deal comes on the back of the Czech Republic's $125 million purchase of 8 multi-mission radar systems developed by Elta for the Iron Dome defense batteries in 2019
Against the background of calls from some European countries to limit the export of weapons and components used to manufacture them to Israel following the war in Gaza, Israel Aerospace Industries and the Ministry of Defense of the Czech Republic are strengthening relations. In the last few days, they signed an agreement in the amount of about $110 million according to which IAI’s subsidiary, Elta Systems, will provide maintenance services for 20 years for the radars that the Czech Ministry of Defense purchased from it in 2019.
The new agreement is a continuation of the deal from the end of 2019, in which the Czech Republic purchased from Elta eight multi-mission radar systems developed for the Iron Dome defense batteries for $125 million. Although the Czech army does not operate the Iron Dome, it uses the radar for intelligence and air control needs and for the needs of countries that are members of the NATO alliance. Elta has provided it with the radars over the past two years and their operational deployment will be completed by the end of this year. By virtue of the current agreement, Elta will cooperate with the Czech companies RETIA and VTU who will be its subcontractors.
Apart from the two deals with Elta, in the coming year four more radars of the same type will be sent to the Czech army, as part of another deal it made in 2020 with Rafael, centered on the Spyder air defense systems.
Over the past few years, Elta has provided countries around the world with about 200 systems of MMR radars that are characterized by the ability to perform a wide variety of tasks such as air defense and detection of hostile aircraft, ranging of artillery against enemy targets, and detection and location of rocket fire, artillery and mortars fired by the enemy. "The radars supplied to the Czech Republic are capable of identifying and classifying hundreds of targets at the same time, including unmanned weapons, missile barrages and relatively new threats appearing in combat arenas," Elta VP & GM Air Defense & Naval Systems division Eyal Shapira told Calcalist. He added that in the coming years, armies in European countries will operate a total of 30 MMR radars, including the armies of Slovakia, Hungary and Germany.
In 2023, Elta's sales totaled $1.66 billion. In the same year, the sales of the parent company IAI increased by 7% and amounted to $5.3 billion. At the end of last week, the company also presented an increase of about 50% in the net profit which amounted to $318 million and an order backlog of about $18 billion.
