EDGE Group CEO says space, Africa are 2 critical areas for growth in coming years

The EDGE Group stand at IDEX 2025. (Agnes Helou/Staff)

IDEX 2025 — As the national champion of the UAE defense market, it’s no surprise that EDGE Group has the largest space on the show floor here at IDEX 2025, nor that it seems to have the lion’s share of unveilings and announcements through the start of the conference.

Among the announcements today: EDGE’s joint venture with Fincantieri, known as MAESTRAL, was awarded its first-ever deal , a five-year, €500 million service support deal with the UAE navy. The conglomerate also unveiled a number of unmanned ground vehicles, its new first-person view UAVs, and debuted its national offshore patrol vessel Falaj 3, dubbed the Altaf.

But as big as its presence seems on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, EDGE has greater ambitions, according to CEO and managing director Hamad Al Marar. He laid out his plans for growth in an exclusive Monday interview with Breaking Defense.

The interview was edited for length and clarity.

BREAKING DEFENSE: You have been EDGE Group CEO for one year now.  What has been achieved by the group during this one year?

HAMAD AL MARAR: Definitely, we have positioned EDGE globally. We have seen a rise in exports and foreign deals. We’ve surely been working towards a stable order book to keep going, and we have been focused on the areas of focus that we always had, which is autonomous systems, EW and smart weapons. We’ve been seeing increased offerings, as we have today in our display in IDEX.

Recently EDGE Group launched POWERTECH, a new aero engine and propulsion company.  What are your plans for the new firm? How far can it take EDGE Groups in the aerospace industry?

Engine and propulsion are a very demanding technical endeavor [for] any organization, any country  We have been seeing successes on many of our developments, whether it was in the micro jets or the, literally, small piston engines. And we don’t see [not to expect] successes in the larger ones. I believe, with putting the right partnerships in place, we will be able to cover, if not all our engine requirements for our systems, [at least] for UAVs.

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You used the show this week to launch your national offshore-patrol vessel Falaj-3. What is EDGE Group’s future plans for the naval sector? And are you planning to develop and manufacture Unmanned Surface Vessels and underwater systems?

We have a very strong drive now towards naval applications, whether it was ships, CMS systems [Combat Management Systems], underwater systems and underwater armament, mine disposal. So yes, there is a very strong drive on the navy sector.

We had certain successes on autonomous surface vehicles, and we’re continuing to do so. One of our entities called Marakeb has been designing autonomous system for vessels.

EDGE Group have integrated its payloads on Turkish Baykar UAVs. Have you seen any countries who are procuring the UAVs with your payloads integrated on them?

Yes. We have signed a deal with an undisclosed country [not UAE], currently operating the [Bayraktar] TB2, and yes, we are on target [for delivery].

EDGE has been investing worldwide for some time now. After Latin America, which was mainly Brazil, what is the second market that your are trying to increase your presence in?

Africa. North Africa, from Egypt to Morocco, the whole of Africa is our focus, besides Brazil, and we have certain focus areas in Asia. But if we look at growth, we see the growth happening fast in Africa.

What about Europe? We saw your interest in investing in European firms, what will that look like going forward?

Definitely, it’s going to pay off. I think when you look at this defense industry, it’s quite regulated. Speaking of Europe, you might speak of NATO; speaking of NATO, that might limit you somehow in collaborating outside NATO. So you take two advantages here. One is for us to establish a leg in Europe, where our entities owned in Europe can play the role of doing the products domestically in Europe and selling to Europe.

Vice versa is also correct, because they also want to establish [presence] in the UAE for what it is meant to be 70 percent of the world, [including] Latin America, Africa, and Asian. So such a relationship needs to be looked at [as] Europe-centric and outside Europe. And I think we’ve been doing very well in that.

In general, our entities in Europe are already selling to Europe. This is how they were born before, and we see the growth happening, and it continues.

With FADA, your new space entity, what is your space ambition? And what are your expectations for FADA, in terms of defense related space, from early warning to missile defense?

Space is the future, and there is so much technology that we have to develop or be on par [with competitors] to keep rendering services. It’s not limited. It [space applications] could be communication, reconnaissance. We are focused on putting the best engineering experts, because we’re not launching it [FADA] for today. We’re really going to continue launching way in the future.

Therefore it is very important for us to have control over our satellites.

For all of this operation [space], you need the regulator. You have players on the market today in Abu Dhabi, Dubai and the UAE that we are fully aligned on, who is going to do what.  You can see us really clearly [focusing] on upstream, others are doing the downstream. We’re looking at military, some of them are looking at civilian. That area is also so big that we have to continuously improve.

Technology is very demanding. We will always try to have the best offering, the best technology, the best AI towards what you want to do.

Big picture for EDGE, what’s your next five-year plan?

Our plan is to continuously grow. Our plan is to grow internationally. Our plan is to see how we can establish alliances with countries outside the UAE.