Rakuten is brokering the sale of German strike drones to Japan’s army. The Tokyo group confirmed on Monday that it is helping Munich-based Helsing finalize a deal to supply unmanned systems to Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Force, which is field-testing the company’s HX-2 loitering munition through the end of September.
That puts one of Japan’s best-known consumer brands inside a weapons procurement, and it puts a European strike drone in front of a military that has spent this year trying to stand up its own. DroneXL reported in July that Helsing had picked West Virginia for its first American factory, building the same aircraft and pitching it to the Pentagon.
Neither company said how many drones are in play or what Japan would pay.
Rakuten Steps Into Arms Brokering Without A Defense Track Record
Rakuten confirmed on Monday that it is helping Helsing close a sale to Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Force. The Tokyo company runs online retail and a mobile carrier. It has no weapons business of its own, and Japan’s Nikkei newspaper reported its role in the deal before either side spoke publicly.
Helsing said it reached an initial agreement with the Japanese government earlier this year, and credited an unnamed local brokerage partner with making that possible. Hideaki Mukai, chief of staff to Rakuten CEO Hiroshi Mikitani, told Reuters that his company wants to widen the door for defense startups, which he said face “significant structural barriers, including complex procurement systems” in Japan.
This is not Rakuten’s first pass at the job. It arranged an April demonstration for a Japanese military unit by Swarmer, the US-listed Ukrainian company whose software flies drones in coordinated groups, and it has helped Ukrainian defense firms exhibit at Japanese arms fairs. Mikitani has been one of Japan’s loudest corporate backers of Kyiv. A company most Americans know for cash-back shopping links is now the front door to Japan’s army.
Ukraine’s Frontline Tests Left The HX-2 Record In Dispute
Bloomberg reported in January that Ukraine had paused further HX-2 orders after frontline trials by its 14th Regiment. An internal German Defense Ministry presentation described takeoff failures and absent autonomy features. Helsing rejected that account and said Ukrainian units had asked for more than 1,000 additional aircraft.
The presentation, dated November 20, 2025 and prepared by a group reporting to General Günter Schneider, said the drones lacked components meant to deliver terminal guidance, midcourse navigation and visual target acquisition. Bloomberg also reported that jamming near the front cut the link between the aircraft and their operators, and that Berlin would not fund follow-on orders unless Kyiv asked for them. A German Defense Ministry spokeswoman said her management had never reviewed or approved the document.
Helsing’s response was specific. The company said it had no knowledge of the presentation, denied a high failure rate on launch, and said the regiment that ran the trials had since requested more than a thousand more drones and that the HX-2 sits in Ukraine’s central military ordering system. “The hit rate of the first flights, which was officially documented, is encouraging,” the company said, disputing the reporting as based on an unapproved internal file.
The aircraft itself is an electrically propelled X-wing munition of about 26 pounds (12 kilograms), quoted at 137 mph (220 km/h) and a reach of 62 miles (100 kilometers). Helsing unveiled it in December 2024 as Europe’s answer to Russia’s Lancet.
Japan Is Shopping Abroad While Building Its Own Drone Industry
Japan approved a record 9.04 trillion yen ($58 billion) defense budget for the fiscal year that began in April, and named uncrewed systems one of its spending priorities. Its acquisition agency picked four domestic drone makers out of 38 applicants this month. Foreign suppliers are circling the same customer.
Tokyo’s cabinet scrapped the five noncombat categories that had limited defense transfers on April 21, clearing Japanese industry to sell any category of finished weapon abroad rather than only the noncombat ones. Reuters reported that the rule change, stacked on top of the spending, has pulled overseas defense firms toward Japan hunting local partners. Anduril is in talks to buy Nissan’s shuttered Oppama plant near Yokosuka to build drones there, and opened a Japanese unit in December.
All of that lands on a country that is simultaneously trying to build the capability itself. The four finalists in the Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Agency’s rapid development program went to navy testing in early August, under a Takaichi government that treats coastal defense by uncrewed aircraft as its answer to Chinese carriers operating closer to Japanese waters every year. Buying German while building Japanese is not a contradiction. It is what a government does when it thinks the clock is short.
The Same Drone Is Headed For A West Virginia Production Line
Helsing chose Martinsburg, West Virginia, in July for its first US plant, a $50 million site designed to turn out more than 2,000 HX-2 drones a month. The company targets initial operating capability in November and full-rate production within a year. It says it is negotiating with the American military.
The Martinsburg factory is meant to create at least 60 jobs at an average salary near $125,000, and US general manager Jennifer McArdle told WV MetroNews last month that “we expect the US military to be procuring our product.” Helsing says the US Army has already tested the aircraft during exercise Flytrap in Lithuania. The company closed a $1.8 billion round in July at an $18 billion valuation, which makes it the best-funded defense technology startup on the continent.
DroneXL’s Take
Give Helsing its due first, because the criticism is easier than the record. The HX-2 is in a shooting war, thousands have gone to Ukraine, Helsing keeps engineers on the front line, and the drone is listed in Kyiv’s central ordering system. A single internal slide deck that the ministry which produced it says its own leadership never approved is thin ground for calling a weapon a failure.
My problem is the evidence base. Every public number about how well the HX-2 actually works comes from Helsing or from that disowned document. Neither Kyiv nor Berlin has released independent launch or hit-rate data, and Helsing’s Flytrap testing claim is Helsing’s own. Japan has not said what threshold the drone has to clear, or whether it will publish anything at all when the tests end. Rakuten, whose expertise is retail logistics and mobile networks, is not the party that closes that gap.
None of that makes the HX-2 a bad buy. It makes it an unaudited one, and unaudited is how a lot of drone procurement is being done right now, in Tokyo and in Washington both. The Pentagon is about to be pitched this same aircraft off a Martinsburg line that opens in November, and it will be pitched on the same combat reputation Japan is testing this month.
Which is why the end of September matters more than Monday’s announcement. Japan’s field tests close then. If Tokyo publishes what it found, allied buyers get the first independent read on this aircraft that anyone outside Helsing has offered. If Tokyo says nothing and signs anyway, the HX-2’s combat record stays exactly what it is today: a vendor’s word against an unapproved slide deck, on a weapon two more governments are about to buy.
I would rather Japan tell us. So would the American taxpayer footing the next order.
Sources: Reuters, Bloomberg, The Defense Post, Helsing, WV MetroNews, The Diplomat
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.
