Startup Stories

Michal Strnad: The Czech Entrepreneur Arming Europe

In 1995, Jaroslav Strnad bought a pile of Soviet tanks with plans to melt them for scrap. He had

By Conor Healy

May 5, 2026

Michal Strnad: The Czech Entrepreneur Arming Europe

In 1995, Jaroslav Strnad bought a pile of Soviet tanks with plans to melt them for scrap. He had 100,000 Czech crowns to his name, about $3,700. The Cold War had just ended and former Warsaw Pact countries were drowning in surplus military equipment.

Thirty years later, his son Michal Strnad is worth $37 billion. The scrapyard is now Czechoslovak Group, a defence conglomerate that went public in January 2026 at a valuation of €25 billion. It was the largest defence IPO in history. BlackRock bought in. Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund bought in. The order book was oversubscribed 14 times.

The tanks Jaroslav bought to destroy are now the foundation of an empire supplying the weapons Ukraine uses against Russia.

From Scrap to Shells

Jaroslav never planned to become an arms dealer. He planned to melt tanks.

But in the chaos of the 1990s, he discovered that decommissioned Soviet equipment still had customers. Spare parts were valuable. Refurbished vehicles even more so. Africa bought. The Middle East bought. The scrap business became a refurbishment business. The refurbishment business became something larger.

By the time Michal finished school at 18, the path was obvious. “At 1 p.m. I got in the car and went to the factory to work,” he told Reuters. No gap year. No business degree. Just the factory. He had been working there since he was 13, sorting parts in a warehouse alongside his grandmother during summer holidays.

In 2013, Jaroslav handed control to his 21-year-old son. In 2018, he transferred full ownership. What followed was a buying spree across Europe and beyond: Tatra Trucks in the Czech Republic, Fiocchi Munizioni in Italy, ammunition plants in Spain and Slovakia, military repair facilities bought directly from the Czech government. CSG became a holding company with stakes in more than 100 businesses.

It was still a regional player. Then the war started.

One Million Shells

Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Within months, a problem that defence analysts had warned about for years became impossible to ignore: Europe could not produce ammunition fast enough.

NATO stockpiles, hollowed out by three decades of peace dividends, were emptying faster than anyone had planned. Ukraine was burning through artillery shells at rates not seen since the World Wars. Western manufacturers, long optimised for efficiency rather than volume, could not keep up.

CSG could.

The company had spent decades working with Soviet-era equipment, the exact systems Ukraine’s military was trained on. Tatra truck chassis were already built into Ukrainian weapons: the Bohdana howitzer, the Bureviy rocket launcher, the Neptune cruise missile that sank Russia’s Black Sea flagship. When Ukraine needed suppliers who understood the hardware, CSG was ready.

Production of large-calibre ammunition increased tenfold. Through the Czech Ammunition Initiative, CSG delivered one million artillery shells in 2024 alone. Deliveries to Ukraine accounted for 42% of the company’s revenue that year.

Revenue grew sevenfold between 2021 and 2025. By the time of the IPO, CSG employed 14,000 people across 39 factories in eight countries. The backlog stood at €15 billion. The pipeline behind it: €27 billion more.

The Reversal

For years, institutional investors avoided defence stocks. ESG mandates screened them out. Pension funds stayed away. The sector was profitable but unfashionable.

That changed fast.

“We had 30 years of peace,” David Chour, CSG’s chief operating officer, told the Irish Times. “But that period has ended.”

The CSG IPO was a test of whether European capital markets would back rearmament at scale. The answer was overwhelming. Sovereign wealth funds, American growth investors, European pension allocators: all competed for allocation. Defence went from ethical exclusion to strategic priority in less than three years.

The company’s own projections assume the demand will outlast the war. A ceasefire, CSG has told investors, would simply redirect orders from Ukraine to NATO countries racing to refill empty stockpiles. “Europe’s rearmament continues to be driven by an increasing geopolitical threat environment that will persist regardless of any ceasefire.”

The peace dividend is not coming back.

Remington Goes Czech

In November 2024, CSG bought The Kinetic Group from Vista Outdoor for $2.23 billion. The deal included Remington Ammunition and Federal Premium, brands older than most European defence contractors.

JD Vance, then a senator, protested the sale. So did Senator John Kennedy, Representative Clay Higgins, and the National Sheriffs’ Association. A chunk of American small-arms ammunition production was passing into foreign hands.

Vista Outdoor shareholders approved it anyway.

CSG is now the largest small-calibre ammunition producer in the world. It holds roughly 35% of the global market. It is the second-largest producer of medium- and large-calibre ammunition in Europe. Michal Strnad has said publicly that his goal is to make CSG Europe’s second-largest defence company overall.

“This Is the World”

The Irish Times asked CSG’s leadership whether there was any discomfort at profiting so visibly from war.

“Each war caused the defence industry to grow and this is something that is natural,” Chour replied. “It’s not something that we can be happy about, that there are wars in our world, but this is the world.”

Strnad himself has been less reflective. In company statements, he talks about “capitalising” on demand and “defining years” and “strong multi-year visibility.” The language of earnings calls, not ethics.

But then, nobody hired him to philosophise. His father handed him the keys to build.

The kid who sorted parts with his grandmother now runs one of the most important supply chains in European security. The scrapyard that was supposed to melt Soviet tanks is now keeping Ukraine in the fight. And the investors who once screened out defence are asking when they can buy more.

Europe is rearming. Michal Strnad is ready.