Thales agreed on Monday to buy the Gorgé family’s 35.51% stake in Exail Technologies for €134 per share ($153), the first step in a full takeover of the French maritime drone maker at an enterprise value of €3.9 billion ($4.45 billion). The agreement lands three days after rival Safran abandoned its own exclusive talks for the same stake.

Exail shares climbed 3.3% to €126.5 in early Paris trading. The offer carries a 44% premium over Exail’s unaffected share price of €93.15 on June 25, the day before takeover speculation started moving the stock, and tops the €128.5 per share Safran had proposed.

DroneXL has covered the militarization of the maritime drone market for more than two years. Ukraine’s Magura drone boats chased Russia’s Black Sea Fleet out of Sevastopol, and autonomous minesweepers became Britain’s answer to Iranian mines in the Strait of Hormuz. Monday’s deal shows Europe’s largest defense technology group deciding it would rather buy that market than keep watching it from the pier.

Thales Pays A 44% Premium To Shut Safran Out

Thales signed a binding agreement for the Gorgé family’s combined 35.51% holding at €134.00 per share and will then file a mandatory tender offer for 100% of Exail’s shares and ODIRNANE bonds with French market regulator AMF, aiming for full ownership by early 2028 at the latest.

The stake purchase needs antitrust and regulatory clearances first, with closing expected by the third quarter of 2027, Thales said in its announcement. The company expects the deal to add more than €90 million ($103 million) to adjusted earnings before interest and taxes by 2032 through run-rate revenue and cost synergies, plus €500 million ($571 million) in additional revenue within ten years from joint research and combined commercial and production platforms.

Safran entered exclusive negotiations for the Gorgé stake on June 26 at €128.5 per share, then said on Friday the talks had ended without an agreement. Julien Thomas, an analyst at TP ICAP Midcap, told Reuters the industrial logic behind a Thales takeover was far clearer than it was for Safran. He added that the French government, which owns roughly 26% of Thales, must have encouraged the deal, and that he expects no antitrust problems.

Exail Brings Mine-Hunting Drones And The Navigation Tech That Guides Them

Exail designs and builds autonomous underwater and surface drones along with the inertial navigation systems that steer them, ranking first in Europe in maritime mine countermeasures robotics and second worldwide in naval inertial navigation, on €479 million ($547 million) of 2025 revenue and roughly 2,200 employees.

The company took its current shape in 2022, when holding company Gorgé SA merged robotics builder ECA Group with navigation and photonics specialist iXblue. Its flagship UMIS system hunts and neutralizes sea mines with fully autonomous drones, while the DriX line of high-endurance surface drones serves civil survey work and, increasingly, defense customers. The entire catalog is ITAR-free, meaning buyers face no U.S. export-control strings. “Exail’s technological development and growth have been exceptional,” chairman and CEO Raphaël Gorgé said in the announcement.

Thales CEO Patrice Caine told reporters the ambition reaches well past demining. “The market we’re targeting isn’t that of mine warfare,” he said, pointing instead at robotic underwater operations as a whole. The two companies told Monday’s press conference they expect the addressable market for anti-submarine warfare to grow almost tenfold by 2030.

War Demand Turned A Family Company Into A €3.9 Billion Prize

Exail’s stock has gained almost 600% over three years as combat in Ukraine and the Middle East converted uncrewed naval systems into procurement priorities, and fears that Iran could mine the Strait of Hormuz handed the shares another surge earlier this year.

The battlefield evidence keeps piling up. Ukraine claimed the first underwater drone strike on a Russian submarine at Novorossiysk in December, Britain weighed sending SWEEP minesweeping drones into the Strait of Hormuz rather than risking warships in March, and U.S. Central Command has spent months swatting Iranian drones away from that same chokepoint.

Investors have sorted the winners accordingly. Rheinmetall shares have dropped around 28% this year even as the German group signs drone agreements, while drone specialists such as Exail and Exosens surged, Reuters reported. Consolidation is accelerating too. Italian shipbuilder Fincantieri said the same day it had sealed agreements for stakes in four companies covering uncrewed underwater and surface drone technology. In Washington, Congress is pushing the Army to buy robot escort boats for its watercraft.

The Takeover Also Defuses A €380 Million Creditor Fight

A dispute with creditor ICG erased 16% of Exail’s share price in early June, after the company revealed a gap of roughly €380 million ($434 million) between the two sides on the value of Exail Holding, the unlisted subsidiary through which ICG holds bonds and preferred shares.

Caine told the press conference that minority holders in the subsidiary would be bought out at the same price as the takeover bid, describing the process as mechanical once an acquisition price exists. Gorgé said discussions with ICG have stayed constructive and pointed to the creditor’s continued support.

DroneXL’s Take

I have spent the past two years watching cheap uncrewed vessels embarrass warships worth hundreds of times more. A Magura boat built in a Ukrainian workshop sinks a patrol ship. A one-off underwater drone puts a Kilo-class submarine out of action, if Kyiv’s claim holds. None of that innovation came out of a prime contractor’s lab, which is exactly why the primes are now writing checks like this one. Thales reached the same conclusion Safran did a week earlier, and Fincantieri announced its own drone shopping spree the same morning: buying beats building.

Here is my problem with the price. Thales is paying wartime multiples on a peacetime clock. The 44% premium is measured against a share price that an active mine crisis in the Strait of Hormuz and years of Black Sea combat footage inflated in the first place, and Thales’ own figures put the deal at roughly 24 times projected 2027 operating profit after cost synergies. Yet the company gets nothing until the third quarter of 2027 at the earliest, and full ownership only in early 2028. If the Gulf crisis that supercharged Exail’s order book cools before the AMF tender offer lands, Thales still pays €134. If it keeps burning, €3.9 billion will look like a bargain and every independent maritime autonomy shop left in Europe gets repriced overnight.

Ukraine is already evaluating American drone boats inspired by its own designs, which tells you where the real center of gravity in this market sits: with whoever iterates fastest under fire. A tender offer doesn’t move that needle. Watch the antitrust review through the third quarter of 2027 and the AMF filing that follows it. If Exail’s order intake keeps pace with its double-digit growth guidance for 2026 through those approvals, Caine will look prescient. If it stalls, he will have bought the top of a war market at the exact moment the war premium deflated.

Sources: Reuters (reporting by Hugo Lhomedet, Jakob Van Calster and Florence Loeve), Thales press release.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.