CSG Buys the Gnaschwitz Explosives Site From MAXAM — EUR 100 Million Into Saxon Nitroglycerin

"The European defence industry needs not only greater ammunition production capacity, but also reliable supplies of strategic energetic materials without which ammunition cannot be manufactured," said Jan Marinov, chief executive of CSG Defence Systems. The plan runs from raw chemistry outward: nitroglycerin and nitroglycerin-based products first, then assembly of ammunition and components, with medium-calibre rounds, tank ammunition and 120 mm mortar munitions named as candidates.

The two German sites now fit together. Walsrode makes nitrocellulose; Gnaschwitz will make nitroglycerin. Those are the two nitration chemistries a double-base propellant requires, and holding both inside one group is the difference between buying propellant and making it. That is a narrower and more defensible position than a filling line, because ammunition assembly can be stood up in many places while nitration plants are permitted, sited and rebuilt slowly.

The seller's side has a pattern of its own. This is Rhône Capital's second energetics exit from MAXAM, after EXPAL went to Rheinmetall in 2023 — and the buyers have consistently been European industrial groups rather than financial ones. Rheinmetall made the mirror move in April 2025, taking the industrial nitrocellulose maker Hagedorn-NC for military-grade conversion; France answered the same question by consolidating Eurenco's propellant and explosive sites under direct state shareholding.

Europe is buying up the nitration layer while the layer beneath it erodes. Nitroglycerin and nitrocellulose both begin with concentrated nitric acid, and that reagent base is thinning rather than thickening: an Imperial College London study previewed the following day found the rate of UK chemical-company closures doubled between 2020 and 2025, with speciality output down sharply and a growing foreign dependency for precisely those inputs — defence-grade capacity, its authors note, that cannot be rapidly reconstituted if lost. A propellant plant with a secure title deed and an imported oxidiser is a shorter supply chain on paper only. Großwald recorded the transaction in Signal No. 116. Two things are checkable from here: whether the purchase enters German investment screening, and when construction starts at Gnaschwitz against the 125 jobs CSG has put on the record.