The world’s largest ever defense IPO took place in January, as arms and ammunition manufacturer Czechoslovak Group floated on Euronext Amsterdam. This emphatically successful listing was the biggest in Emea since 2022, and the biggest ever of any company headquartered in central and eastern Europe. J.P. Morgan was a joint global co-ordinator and stabilisation manager.
Started in 1995 by Czech scrap merchant Jaroslav Strnad, CSG began by dealing in surplus military equipment, abundantly available at the time after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. Later it expanded into the manufacture of ammunition, military vehicles, electronics and aviation equipment. The current owner and chair is Jaroslav’s son, Michal Strnad, who took over ownership in 2018.
Great ambitions
The company’s growth accelerated under Michal, who said he wanted to make CSG the largest defense business in Europe. J.P. Morgan’s relationship with the company has developed along the way.
The bank was sole financial adviser to CSG in its $2.23bn all-cash acquisition of US small arms ammunition maker Kinetic (whose assets include Remington Ammunition). The purchase was agreed in 2023 but, after US political opposition and a number of interference bids, was only sealed more than a year later.
In June 2025 J.P. Morgan was joint global co-ordinator and physical bookrunner on CSG’s debut $1bn and €1bn high-yield, dual-tranche bond issue. Oversubscription allowed the issue to be upsized and the price tightened to USD 6.5 per cent and EUR 5.25 per cent, respectively.
The initial public offering is CSG’s latest strategic step forward. “The business has grown massively in the past five to seven years, and the company felt that now was the right time for an IPO,” says Ashish Jhajharia, J.P. Morgan’s London-based head of Emea ECM.
From left: Vittorio Rivaroli, Ashish Jhajharia, Sunil Dhupelia © Dave Vickers/FT
Increased standing
Strnad junior has said that the company did not actually need to go public. One motive was the cachet bestowed by a listing, according to Joshua Sutton, a London-based J.P. Morgan executive director. “In defense, the majority of your customers are ministries of defense or armies,” Sutton points out. “A listing gives you the same standing as that enjoyed by other global defense primes.”
Strnad’s growth ambitions have not been sated, so another motive could be to provide the company with acquisition currency in the form of traded shares.
Ukraine has been a very important end customer, particularly for ammunition, accounting for 26 per cent of annual sales for the nine months to September 2025. The Kinetic acquisition meaningfully increased the proportion of non-defense ammo customers such as hunters and law enforcement agencies.
Nonetheless, investors rightly see CSG as overwhelmingly a defense business, a sector for which they have new appetite. Current geopolitical tensions will make defense a European structural growth driver for the next decade, Jhajharia believes.
“European defense players will benefit from the increased defense spend,” he notes. “But historically there have only been a handful of listed ways to play European defense, which creates scarcity value.”
Sunil Dhupelia, J.P. Morgan’s London-based head of international ECM, points out that the groundwork for today’s IPOs needs to begin well in advance. “In global deals, investors now want to meet the company 18 months pre-IPO, not three months,” Dhupelia says. “Relationships are being built much earlier.”
In CSG’s case, a dialogue with the capital markets has been under way for some time. “Their story began to be heard in the summer of 2025,” Sutton reckons. “And a high-yield bond is often the first step to an IPO, planting the seeds in the capital markets.”
Ukraine drives demand
When considering the possibility of an IPO, some investors wondered about the effect on CSG if and when the situation in Ukraine normalises. The answer to that question, according to Sutton, revolves around the need for restocking, which should sustain demand.
“Ukraine and its donors are consuming supplies very quickly,” he says. “So those stocks will need replenishment, whatever happens. If peace returns, the level of preparedness for Nato will be materially higher than it was before, with a 10- to 15-year restocking cycle.”
Sutton adds that, before the invasion of Ukraine, Nato armies did not train with live ammunition. That has changed, with positive implications for CSG.
The IPO was announced in the third week of January and priced little more than a week later. J.P. Morgan was a joint global co-ordinator, alongside BNP Paribas, UniCredit and Jefferies. The offer itself promised €750mn of new shares with additional secondary sales by a Strnad vehicle. It had three cornerstone investors, each undertaking to buy shares worth €300mn. They were US fund managers Artisan Partners and BlackRock, and Al-Rayyan Holding, wholly owned by the Qatar Investment Authority.
Blanket appeal
The breadth and depth of demand was described by one banker as “extraordinary”, attracting investors of all types: top-tier and boutique funds, long-only and hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds and family offices. Allocations had to be scaled back for all investor classes.
Thanks to the level of pre-launch interest, the shares were offered at a fixed price of €25 each. That valued the company at €25bn. With an additional €3bn of secondary stock on offer, books were covered within only four minutes of launch.
“The transaction was attractively priced, taking into account the feedback received from investors over the extensive investor engagement exercise,” says Jhajharia. “We had very clear visibility of investor demand and valuation ahead of launch of the IPO, allowing us to reduce the execution timeline to six business days only and launch the bookbuild with a fixed price instead of a range.”
An overallotment option of shares worth another €500mn was exercised unusually swiftly, on the first day of trading, to raise total proceeds to €3.8bn. Taking that into account, the Strnad family vehicle is left with 84.8 per cent of the business, leaving 15.2 per cent in public hands.
This was the largest Amsterdam listing since 2015. CSG’s shares shot up by 31 per cent on day one, closing at €32.85 and valuing the company at almost €33bn.
Coming IPOs
With CSG having reopened the trade for the European defense market, bankers are expecting a number of other defense players to seek listings, hoping to capitalise on high valuations. Possible candidates have been reported to include Franco-German tank manufacturer KNDS and Doncasters Group, a UK metal engineer specialising in military and civil aerospace components.
While Doncasters Group has been exploring the possibility of a New York IPO, there are hopes that CSG is symptomatic of the continued recovery of European IPO markets.
“The European IPO market reopened in the second half of last year, and CSG is another step in that development,” observes Vittorio Rivaroli, J.P. Morgan’s Milan-based head of continental Europe ECM. “We are receiving [requests for proposals] at a rate of one a week, a healthy pace not seen for the past two and a half years.”
Even London, which has been struggling to attract IPOs, is seeing new listings pick up. “There has been an improvement in the narrative around the UK market,” Rivaroli acknowledges.
If the market sees IPOs happening and sees them performing well, this will stimulate further listings, he insists. “Other sectors are now becoming more interesting, with a rotation towards more capital-heavy sectors,” he notes.
They include the “electrification theme”, semiconductors and the mining sector, Rivaroli says. “Europe offers a lot of these companies and we can expect to see more of them coming for IPOs.”
Dhupelia agrees. “Activity attracts activity,” he says. “We may have come full circle. Now that markets feel better in Europe, more companies could take advantage of the fact that being listed in your home market is the best place to be.”
Dhupelia adds that the follow-on market in Europe is currently looking healthier. “And while we haven’t been seeing many large acquisition financings, we will see those getting busier this year,” he predicts.
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