Norway is among the fastest-growing defence markets in Europe. For a supplier, the number that matters is not the size of the market, but how fast new component spend is being added to it.
The size of the Norwegian defence market matters less than its speed. Industry turnover grew 34% in 2024, to over NOK 46bn (EUR 3.9bn), and the order backlog grew faster still, to more than three times annual revenue. That backlog is years of contracted work the industry has not yet been able to deliver, so the growth ahead is already booked, not hoped for. The component spend NDIP addresses, roughly NOK 16bn (EUR 1.38bn) today, is growing an estimated 20–25% a year on this trajectory. It is underpinned by a defence budget that nearly doubled from 2021 to 2026, from NOK 65bn (EUR 5.6bn) to NOK 112bn (EUR 9.6bn), and a NOK 1,624bn (EUR 139bn) Long-Term Defence Plan.
And the order books are growing faster than revenue. Across the industry, revenue has grown more than 20% a year since 2020, while the backlog has climbed from about 1.5 to more than 3 times annual revenue, demand outrunning the capacity to deliver it:
Norway is a NATO founder and an EEA member, but not an EU member. That places Norwegian and European content on the favoured side of the EU's new defence-industrial rules. Under the EUR 150bn SAFE instrument, at least 65% of component cost must originate in the EU, Ukraine or the EEA. Offset obligations are largely waived for EEA-based suppliers, and ITAR-free European content is actively preferred. A European producer represented through a Norwegian counterpart sits inside both local-content boundaries at once, which is exactly the supplier a Norwegian prime now needs.
The contractors are supply-constrained, not demand-constrained. The hardest bottleneck is energetics, propellant and explosives, where Europe is structurally short and the incumbents cannot close the gap alone. Components and electronics are in broad pull. But the window is specific. As Kongsberg puts it, «once production is underway, it is extremely difficult to become a supplier.» The openings are in the development and capacity-build phase, and that phase is happening now.
NDIP represents European defence-component producers into the Norwegian supply chain as a commercial agent, under binding agency agreements, backed by a documented governance, vetting and quality-assurance framework. We carry the qualification work, clearance, quality, export control and integrity. A contractor gains secure, allied supply through one accountable Norwegian counterpart. A supplier gains access it could not build alone, while the window is open. ndip.no