BAE Systems Hägglunds is expecting to close its Nordic Initiative, under which CV90 infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) will be put under contract for four current CV90 customers – Sweden, Norway, Finland and the Netherlands – plus one new customer – Lithuania – by the end of this year.
Speaking to journalists at Eurosatory 2026 on 16 June, Peter Nygren, director of business development for BAE Systems Hägglunds, said, “We are actually today delivering the best and final offer to the customers and we will start the final negotiations. The contract, I can’t say when it will be signed, but well within this year.”
Delivering the CV90 Nordic Initiative is a challenge for the company because, of a total of around 1,950 CV90s contracted for so far, 647 are still on the orderbook: 152 CV9035 MkIVs for Slovakia ordered in December 2022, 246 CV9030 MkIVs for the Czech Republic ordered in May 2023, 115 CV9035 MkIIICs for Denmark and 50 CV9035 MkIIICs for Sweden ordered in December 2024 alongside 40 more co-financed for Ukraine, and 44 additional CV90 MkIIICs ordered by Denmark in November 2025.
Nygren said of the Nordic Initiative that it was “the customers who came to us and said we urgently need more vehicles and we want CV90. That was when the orderbook was full, so we had to find a new way to do new things. So we said to them, ‘OK, we can do this if we do a joint procurement, so we build one programme, and we can do it if you harmonise requirements and we use what we have possible’, meaning that we take a Slovak CV90 MkIV and take that to the Nordic context, so minimal changes in order to save time.”
Nygren said of the five nations, “We’ve been working very closely with them. It’s a new way of finding a co-operation for five nations to procure in one programme, so we have to invent along the way, together with the customers, in order to cope with this situation, so it’s been dynamic and very interesting.”
To ramp up for the Nordic Initiative programme, Nygren said, “We have invested already EUR 300 million in Örnsköldsvik, where we have our factory, and we are investing another EUR 150 million to cope with this, but the secret to meet the high demand is not to grow organically in Örnsköldsvik; it’s to build the partners in the nations, so we will do a lot of the production in the countries that will receive these vehicles, just as we do in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, where local industry is playing a large part. It would be absolutely impossible for us to cope with the amount of vehicles that are to be produced [otherwise].
“So currently our focus is to deliver on the orderbook that we have, because it’s crucial because of the security situation, and it’s also to get the Nordic Initiative with the five nations on contract. We’ve already started, even though we’re not under contract; we’ve already started the programme, so the program is up and running at our risk because we want to make sure that we deliver on time.”
He added that the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration (FMV) “will put an order on some long lead items in order to also save time in order to be able to deliver”.
Separately, Nygren told Warsight that Slovenia, which has an upcoming requirement to replace its fleet of obsolescent Yugoslav-built M-84 main battle tanks (MBTs), could be the first customer for BAE Systems Hägglunds’ 120 mm-gun armed CV90120. This is because the latest Western MBTs would be too heavy to cross bridges in Slovenia’s mountain ranges.
While the M-84, which is based on the Soviet T-72M, weighs around 41.5 tonnes, the latest Leopard 2A8 weighs around 69.5 tonnes. The latest CV90120 MkIV prototype, however, which is armed with a Rheinmetall 120 mm L44A1 Low Recoil (LR) smoothbore gun and is thus a significant direct-fire platform, has a gross vehicle weight of around 40 tonnes.
