French land mobility specialist Texelis and United Arab Emirates-based Advanced Armoured Engineering (AAE) have entered into a strategic memorandum of understanding (MoU) to collaborate on developing new land defence solutions.
Announced on 30 January 2024 just ahead of the World Defense Show 2024 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the new partnership will see AAE’s armoured solutions integrated with Texelis’ mobility solutions.
“Texelis’ and AAE’s solutions combined can offer a great opportunity for new or current manufacturers to create new ranges and develop new vehicles from scratch in record time,” the French company stated in a press release.
“Texelis truly believes in partnerships,” the company’s sales director, Sébastien Guillon, was quoted as saying. “One never achieves anything great alone, which we demonstrated with the fantastic team we put together to create Celeris [the company’s 4×4 full military mobility solution, launched in November 2023]. We wanted a trusted partner to further develop our solution, and this is exactly what we found at AAE. Working with AAE will help us getting access to zones where they are well established, such as the Middle East. We will also be co-operating through joint promotion and future product development for added value for our customers and partners.”
Abdon Castro, AAE’s commercial director, added, “This strategic partnership with Texelis provides to manufacturers of military vehicles a great opportunity to seamlessly integrate an all-rounded proven mobility platform in use by European armed forces with our solutions that are designed to use high-grade and latest generations of armour steel to jointly address the dynamic needs of end users while developing advanced solutions for heavy military vehicles.”
Texelis is a leading company in the design and manufacture of axles, drivelines and complete mobility solutions for 4×4, 6×6 and 8×8 military vehicles. In 2018 the Direction générale de l’armement (DGA), the French government’s defence procurement agency, contracted Texelis to develop the mobility solution for its Serval light armoured multi-role vehicle (VBMR-L), which fulfils the light vehicle component of France’s Scorpion programme. Texelis is responsible for delivering the full vehicle driveline for integration with the systems produced by Nexter for Serval.
AAE, meanwhile, is a provider of armoured steel-based survivability solutions for heavy military vehicles that the company sells to the international vehicle OEM community.
