Industry should be geared towards defence says industry captain

The President of Portugal’s industrial confederation (CIP) says that Portugal should convert some of its factories to manufacturing armaments as the NATO countries gear up to hike defence spending to as much as 5% of GDP.

In an interview with the business daily Negócios, Armindo Monteiro, said that Portugal should take advantage of defence contracts and said that there were already some industrial units that had been reconverted for military production and others could follow their example with metalworks, textiles (uniforms) and footwear among the examples.

“We have an opportunity because of defence policies. If we imagine that threats come from the the East (Russia) it’s a good thing for industry to be as far out of the way as possible, and in this sense Portugal offers a geographical advantage and for this we need to be able to attract investments,” he said.
“We have to reactivate some defence industries that we still have, but in particular make the most of some industries that are fully operational and convert them. An example is the automotive sector which is suffering a downturn, so why not turn this capacity into defence production”, said Monteiro, adding that it was relatively simple to turn car manufacturing into arms manufacturing and that it had already been done and was happening.

Image: Thales Edisoft is a company in Portugal involved in defence applications