A single air-defence missile can cost $3m to shoot down a $20,000 drone. For Rodrigo Torres, that lopsided maths captures how much modern conflict has changed, and it is precisely the kind of shift EDGE has built itself to exploit.
In little more than six years, the Abu Dhabi group has gone from a government drive to consolidate the UAE’s scattered defence firms into one of the world’s leading defence and technology companies, with around $5bn in revenue, a backlog above $20bn and over 18,000 people across what Torres describes as more than 40 companies.
Much of that growth has come from abroad: 25 transactions spanning M&A and joint ventures, orders across Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia, and a fast-expanding push into Europe and NATO.
Torres, who joined at EDGE‘s founding in 2019 after 21 years at General Electric, has helped steer that expansion as president and group CFO. In a conversation with Gulf Business editor Neesha Salian, he discussed the group’s ambitions overseas, the partnership model behind its speed, how it is building supply-chain resilience, and why he is convinced the surge in global defence spending is a decade-long structural shift rather than a bubble.
How do you balance commercial performance with international expansion and the country’s strategic priorities?
The government’s vision in 2019 was to aggregate the country’s defence companies to improve sovereign capability and avoid fragmentation. At the time, each was largely a single-product business, with varied origins, some born from offsets, others family-owned.
Six years on, we’ve made significant progress on that consolidation, but we’ve also expanded abroad through 25 transactions, split between M&A and joint ventures.
Our mandate has shifted from building domestic service capability to driving international growth, and we’re now among the world’s leading defence companies and still growing fast.
What does the revenue mix look like today?
Our intake is currently around 70 per cent international and 30 per cent local. Revenue takes longer to reflect that shift, since projects typically run three to five years from order to delivery.
As a result, revenue today is still weighted more towards local at roughly 80-20, and we expect that to move to around 70-30 next year as international projects mature.
How should investors read the size and quality of your international backlog?
It’s very healthy, and these are signed orders. In Angola, we’re building the navy almost from scratch, which includes three large vessels, drones and interceptors.
We signed a strong contract to deliver nationwide surveillance programmes with several countries across Africa and South America, and in Brazil we’re supplying the weaponisation and missile capability for four new frigates.
Just recently, we received an order from a NATO country for our armoured vehicles. Our backlog was initially concentrated in Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia; we’re now expanding into Europe as well.
What’s the thinking behind the European push?
Our footprint already includes companies in Estonia, Switzerland, Poland, a recent acquisition in Italy and a joint venture in Spain. We used those capabilities to win orders outside NATO, and now the idea is to generate business inside NATO too, with a commercial base in Paris.
Europe isn’t only pushing defence budgets towards 5 per cent, there’s also financing coming through Brussels. Even though our backlog there isn’t large yet, we believe we need to invest ahead of demand, so that the groundwork is already in place by the time orders materialise.
How are you prioritising investment in AI, autonomous systems and advanced technologies?
We have a strong local team and benefit from the Abu Dhabi ecosystem, TII and the wider AI landscape, but we also look to Europe, Latin America and South Africa.
Even with a large portfolio, we always concentrate investment on a few key areas: electronic warfare, communication systems, smart weapons, and autonomy.
Our recent acquisition of AKAER in Brazil is a good example: it brings capability in designing supersonic and stealth aircraft, built around an engineering centre rather than manufacturing, which benefits the whole group.
Defence spending has become a priority. How is EDGE capturing that while keeping financial discipline?
We were roughly a billion-dollar company; we’re now five billion, and our international backlog has grown around 400 per cent from a standing start.
We can’t outmatch decades of legacy competition alone, so we’ve done it through the right partnerships.
In the last two years, joint ventures and M&A alone captured around $2.5bn of orders, roughly 10 per cent of our intake. That includes what we’ve done with Fincantieri and Leonardo in Italy, and Indra in Spain, making ourselves and our partners successful.
How is EDGE building supply-chain resilience while scaling globally?
Recent conflicts made clear that we cannot rely entirely on external sources, so we classify our supply chain by criticality.
Class A covers the most critical subsystems, which we develop and manufacture domestically or within one of our companies abroad. Class B is important but less critical, so it becomes a make or buy decision based on the circumstances. Class C covers commodity items that any qualified supplier can provide.
What are your priorities for the next three to five years?
Our ambition is to become a top 10 global player. That means growing significantly while keeping the mentality of a startup. Top 10 in scale, but agile in mindset, with strong partnerships and a solid global footprint.
Ultimately, we want to be recognised as a technology company: big in reach, but agile in how we operate.
With this many partnerships, how do you stay agile day to day?
Strong governance is a given, but we try to trust people. Having worked at a large global corporation before this, I saw checks and balances sometimes taken to an extreme. One example: in all our acquisitions we’ve never replaced the founder as CEO, we keep them running the company, which creates the speed to decide quickly.
Our chairman, Faisal Al Bannai, is a huge promoter of agility. When you become big you can become slow, and we work hard not to.
What are the main challenges you’re tackling?
The biggest challenge is integration, we’re now more than 40 companies, and full integration isn’t there yet, the task ahead is bringing the group’s full horsepower together.
Second, some see the current defence spending surge as a bubble. I don’t, and even if it is, it’s a ten year one, not a short-term spike. The more pressing question is what kind of company EDGE becomes: a technology company with a strong defence portfolio, like Thales or Leonardo, or a defence contractor built primarily around military platforms, like Rheinmetall or Lockheed Martin.
Third, and this is really an opportunity rather than a challenge, we’re deeply multicultural, with more than 95 nationalities, which brings huge richness in experience and background across the group.
As a government-backed company with global ambitions, is it hard to stay aligned with national objectives?
Honestly, I don’t see it as a challenge, it only looks like one from outside.
We operate as a commercial company, but every major defence peer also has national programmes at their core, Leonardo, Indra, Rheinmetall, Thales included. Having that national mandate doesn’t limit our global ambitions, if anything it strengthens them, since many of our international contracts, including in Africa and the recent $7bn Indonesia announcement, are themselves government-to-government agreements.
Which markets matter most, and where is the industry heading?
On backlog, Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia remain our core markets, with NATO becoming increasingly important going forward.
We’re also looking closely at law enforcement, which in some countries rivals defence in scale. Brazil, for instance, has more than 350,000 police officers, and demand there is strong for surveillance and AI capabilities.
As for where systems themselves are heading, the economics of warfare have shifted. An air-defence missile can cost $3m to intercept a $20,000 drone, a cost imbalance that isn’t sustainable at scale. That means the priority now is fielding large quantities of lower-cost systems that can be sustained over long, drawn-out conflicts.
There’s also a major investment in connectivity, the ability to link all your forces together.
Finally, decision-making is increasingly driven by AI, which holds a live picture of the adversary and allows far more informed decisions to be made, faster.
