Headquartered beside Prague’s Vltava river, in a modern building designed to retain an industrial feel inside, is one of the fastest-growing companies you’ve probably never heard about.
The Czechoslovak Group (CSG) is among a handful of big European companies in the defence industry that have done very well from the war in Ukraine. The decision by the Czech defence firm to row in early as a big supplier of the Ukrainian army, selling ammunition and armoured vehicles, has helped it expand rapidly.
Is there any unease inside the company at doing so well financially out of a war?
“Each war caused the defence industry to grow and this is something that is natural ... It’s not something that [we] can be happy about, that there are wars in our world, but this is the world,” says David Chour, CSG chief operating officer and deputy board chair.
READ MORE
“We had 30 years of peace,” but that period has ended, he says. Spending significantly bigger portions of national budgets on defence and security is the new “normal”, Chour says.
“So we are here, we are here ready to supply European countries, help them to restock, help them support their modernisation of their [army] land systems, and we are here ready to support Ukraine’s forces.”
That’s not an altruistic pursuit of course, but business. Financial results released in the last few days show CSG reported a net profit of €870 million last year, a 35 per cent bump on 2024. The group reported an annual revenue of €6.7 billion and said it has €15 billion in orders on its books to be filled.
Michal Strnad, CSG chief executive and chairman, described 2025 as a “defining year” for the group.
In a statement released alongside the financial results, Strnad, now the wealthiest man in Czech Republic, said the company was “well placed to capitalise” on strong demand from a push by Nato countries to rearm and spend more on their defence, and “geopolitical developments”.
The Czechoslovak Group was set up by his father, Jaroslav Strnad, who saw an opportunity in the years after the Cold War, buying up Soviet-era military equipment that might have otherwise been scrapped.
Michal Strnad (33) took CSG public at the start of this year, capitalising on the huge appetite among investors to bet on defence companies. In the process Strnad became one of the richest men in the world.
CSG has been busy acquiring smaller defence companies. It employs about 14,000 people across more than 100 firms and suppliers. A few hundred employees are based in its head office in Prague.
Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 should have woken Europe up to the threat Moscow posed to the wider Continent, Chour says.
“In 2022 the Ukraine war started and it changed, because suddenly the war was close to our lives, suddenly we started thinking whether Ukraine would be the last country attacked by Russia, and maybe that we are under huge danger,” he says.
For people living in Spain, Italy or Ireland sometimes the war still felt “far away”. There was an attitude there that the conflict was in Europe, “but it’s the eastern part of Europe, it’s different, it’s not our lives,” he says. “If any African country would attack and invade Sicily for example, or Spain, the reaction would be much different.”
That complacency might only be truly shattered if there was a future attack on an EU state, perhaps a Baltic country, he says. It is “fundamental” for Europe to keep up its support to Ukraine. Nobody wants to have Russian troops 1,500 kilometres closer to them, he says. “Without European support Ukraine wouldn’t survive.”
How does Chour think the war will end? “There should be some deal, but if the deal will happen in three months or three years or 10 years, nobody knows.”
Don’t expect the conversation about defence spending to be shelved in the event of a peace settlement.
European governments have committed to significantly increase the money put towards their militaries, recognising the need to deter Vladimir Putin and the fact Washington can no longer be relied upon to help protect Europe.
A shaky truce where Russia holds all or most of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas territory might not be the end of things.
Chour says he is afraid that Russia still views Europe as weak and after regrouping may launch another attempt to take the remainder of Ukraine, and “maybe more”.
It’s certainly a good time to be in the business of selling weapons.
