Sweden’s Saab is making the most aggressive industrial pitch of any contender to replace Portugal’s ageing fleet of F-16 fighters — and it is doing so by trying to put Portuguese factories and engineers at the centre of the Gripen E programme. Over recent months the Swedish group has signed memoranda of understanding with two Portuguese champions: OGMA, the aeronautical maintenance and manufacturing company at Alverca, and Critical Software, the Coimbra-based safety-critical software house. The message to Lisbon is blunt: choose the Gripen, and a meaningful slice of the work stays in Portugal.
The Portuguese Air Force needs to replace roughly 27 to 28 F-16s over the coming decade, a generational decision that will shape the country’s defence-industrial base well into the 2040s. Three finalists remain on the table: Saab’s Gripen E, Lockheed Martin’s F-35, and the Airbus-led Eurofighter consortium. As of June 2026, Portugal’s Ministry of Defence has confirmed the process remains officially open, and Lisbon has not yet launched a formal tender — leaving a long runway in which industrial offers, not just flyaway price, are doing the persuading.
Why the OGMA card matters. Saab’s strategy deliberately echoes the model it built with Embraer in Brazil, where the Gripen was partly assembled and supported locally. OGMA — the Indústria Aeronáutica de Portugal at Alverca, with Embraer as its industrial anchor shareholder — already supplies components into the Gripen supply chain, giving Saab a credible Portuguese partner rather than a paper promise. Under the proposed arrangement, OGMA could participate in production, maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) activity, and Saab has signalled that the scope could expand to final assembly and a regional MRO hub on Portuguese soil if Lisbon selects the aircraft.
The second MoU, with Critical Software, points at the higher-margin end of the value chain. Founded in Coimbra in 1998, Critical Software builds dependable systems for aerospace, defence and rail, and would be positioned to contribute to avionics and mission-software work. For a Portuguese technology sector that has spent two decades exporting engineering talent, embedding a national firm inside a European fighter programme is precisely the kind of high-value anchor that policymakers in Lisbon say they want.
The political backdrop favours a European jet. In March 2025, Defence Minister Nuno Melo signalled that Portugal would not actively pursue the F-35 in the near term and that European platforms should be prioritised — a posture shaped by Europe’s broader push toward strategic autonomy and by reservations about software and sustainment dependencies on the United States. That stance does not guarantee a Gripen win — the Eurofighter is also a European option, and the F-35 retains powerful interoperability arguments within NATO — but it has visibly improved Saab’s odds and sharpened the value of a local-industry offer.
A two-way corridor story. On its face this is a classic Nordic-into-Portugal play: a Swedish prime contractor seeking to enter a new market with capital, technology and a multi-decade support relationship. But the structure Saab is proposing is genuinely bidirectional. If the Gripen is chosen, OGMA and Critical Software would be plugged into Saab’s global programme — meaning Portuguese firms exporting parts, MRO services and software back into a Swedish-led platform sold worldwide. That is the texture of the modern Nordic-Iberian corridor: not just goods crossing borders, but supply chains interleaving in both directions.
What to watch next. The decisive signals will be procedural rather than ceremonial: whether and when Lisbon formally launches the competition, how much offset and local-content weight the tender assigns, and whether Saab converts its MoUs into binding workshare commitments. For Nordic suppliers and Portuguese sub-contractors alike, the Gripen campaign is a live case study in how defence-industrial cooperation is becoming one of the most consequential threads of the Portugal ↔ Scandinavia relationship — alongside green energy, data centres and the drone-and-ISR boom now reshaping both ends of the corridor.
Whatever Lisbon ultimately decides, Saab has already changed the terms of the debate. By arriving with named Portuguese partners rather than a standalone aircraft, it has reframed the F-16 replacement as an industrial-policy question as much as a military one — and made Sweden’s offer the one its rivals now have to answer.