Turkey’s MKE launches first company in Egypt

BEIRUT — Turkish munitions and air defense platform manufacturer Mechanical and Chemical Industry Corporation (MKE) announced today it has opened its first company in Egypt, dubbed Zafer, to facilitate joint ventures with Egyptian firms, the company said.

“We established a company called ‘Zafer’ entirely under Egyptian law, with all of its shares owned by MKE,” MKE General Manager Ilhami Keles told Anadolu press agency today at the Al-Alamein airshow in Egypt.

A company official confirmed to Breaking Defense that Zafer is state-owned MKE’s first company in Africa.

“We established this company in Cairo to contribute to our commercial operations in Egypt, as well as our commercial activities in Africa and the Gulf region,” Keles said, according to Anadolu.

“Egypt has the capability to produce military vehicles. We are moving forward with joint production integrating Egypt’s capabilities with our turret and command-and-control systems, as well as our hard-kill and soft-kill solutions,” he told Anadolu.

MKE has previously worked with Egypt, signing a deal in February to equip the Egyptian armed forces with its Tolga short air defense system

Tolga is a layered short-range air defense system that has both an electronic-warfare soft-kill option, and a 35MM cannon and laser-guided interceptors for a hard-kill option. Tolga, which is designed to eliminate medium, small and micro drones, can protect critical infrastructure, like military bases, air bases, naval bases, and oil production sites.

Further, earlier this year, Breaking Defense spoke with MKE’s regional manager for the Middle East and Africa Ersin Kandur, who said that since the start of the conflict in Iran, the firm has seen “increasing demand” from the Gulf states for air defense systems, calling out the Tolga short-range platform in particular.

Since the beginning of the conflict between the US and Israel and Iran, “the demand for our product [has] increased very much,” Kandur told Breaking Defense in a May interview, to the point there is “five times more” interest than before the conflict.