Oliver Burkhard does not like champagne. Even if he did, the chief executive of German shipbuilder TKMS would not be popping corks, despite just having been picked for what promises to be the biggest deal in the company’s history.
Although TKMS was named the “preferred supplier” of up to 12 new submarines last month by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in a deal worth some tens of billions of euros, Burkhard says it is too early to celebrate.
“The real work starts now,” he told the FT. “We must negotiate to reach a contract. We don’t have it yet.”
It is a typically cautious assessment from the understated Burkhard, who has pursued a highly unusual professional journey from union leader to corporate chief executive.
TKMS, partly owned by the industrial conglomerate Thyssenkrupp, also came under the spotlight in late June when it clinched a deal to supply the German navy with up to eight Meko A-200 anti-submarine frigates.
The win came after defence minister Boris Pistorius pulled the plug on a rival warship project that leading defence contractor Rheinmetall had expected to take over, causing its share price to plunge almost 20 per cent.
TKMS’s win has eased some worries about its future, which swirled after it went public in October last year, around the same time as Rheinmetall branched into the naval business.
TKMS then beat South Korean defence giant Hanwha in the contest for the Canadian submarine deal a few weeks later. Burkhard said that TKMS was reaping the benefits of having “done our homework”, although he said that winning orders was “as exhausting and time-consuming as ever”.
The 54-year-old became TKMS chief in May 2022, a few months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine kick-started a surge in European defence spending.
He joined Thyssenkrupp in 2013 after 16 years at IG Metall, Germany’s biggest and most powerful trade union.
At the Essen-based industrial giant, he went on to oversee the divestment of a slew of company divisions and thousands of redundancies.
He strove to “balance the interests” of employees and the company and to reach solutions that allowed “everyone to keep working together the next day”, he said.
His years spent negotiating wage deals at IG Metall taught him the art of the “political compromise”, a skill that he believed prepared him well for the highly political business of selling warships and submarines.
When Burkhard took over the helm at TKMS in 2022, the company’s prospects were already looking up after a rocky period marred by uncertainty.
The previous year, Germany and Norway had struck a €5.5bn deal to jointly procure six of the company’s type 212CD submarines.
But the Ukraine war spurred fresh deals and extensions of existing orders as Nato members sought to step up their defences against Russia, especially in the Baltic and north Atlantic.
The company also benefited from souring relations between US President Donald Trump and Canada, pushing Ottawa towards closer defence ties with Europe. German officials threw their weight behind TKMS’s Canada pitch, promising that a German submarine deal would come with joint training, maintenance and even crew-sharing arrangements for decades to come.
After losing out to Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries on a $6.5bn frigate deal for Australia last year, it won a new order from longtime customer Singapore.
The company soon hopes to sign an $8bn deal with India’s state-owned Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders to jointly produce six submarines for the country’s navy. TKMS is also pushing into the rapidly growing field of unmanned systems.
Analysts at Deutsche Bank said earlier this month that TKMS had now “successfully converted all its outstanding major multibillion contract opportunities” and predicted that its order book would more than double to “well above €40bn” as a result.
The share price has had a choppy ride since October, but Burkhard said the company was still working through some “legacy orders” from before 2022 that were struck at less favourable terms. He cautioned it was unclear whether the Canadian order for the submarines would “come in tranches or all at once”, adding that it would “take a while” before any earnings lift.
Despite a booming order book, he stressed the importance of “prudent growth,” noting: “I don’t want to double every four years . . . The company would not necessarily be able to cope.”
Rather than chasing more new contracts, he is focused on delivery: “Execution, execution, execution.”
Revenues reached €2.2bn in the year to September 2025. The company’s medium-term goal is an adjusted operating profit margin of more than 7 per cent — compared with 6 per cent last year and less than 2 per cent in 2022.
Some in the industry have questioned TKMS’s ability to deliver, pointing to a chequered record on its deliveries for the German navy.
The first of a series of F125 frigates, built by TKMS together with NVL, was delayed by years. The K130 corvette also suffered severe delays — although TKMS was only a part of the consortium that built it rather than the lead contractor.
TKMS has promised to hand over the first Meko A-200 frigate to the German navy by the end of 2029, with a new ship every seven months after that.
Burkhard is confident that the “off-the-shelf” ship, already sold in similar form to Egypt, Algeria and Brazil, can be delivered on time. He says he looks forward to the day when he can say: “Look, the doubts were unfounded.”
He believed that Rheinmetall may have “underestimated . . . the complexity” of the frigate project dropped by Berlin in June. But Burkhard said he did not want to write off Rheinmetall’s shipbuilding ambitions. The expected deal had been a key driver in Papperger’s decision to pay €1.5bn for NVL in a deal that closed in March.
“We do not underestimate them. I hope they don’t underestimate us either.”
