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vor Ichikowitz has spent three decades building Paramount Group into a privately owned defence manufacturer with customers across multiple continents. Now, with Ukraine’s war accelerating demand for protected mobility, the South African entrepreneur is steering his company toward one of the world’s most urgent procurement markets.
Paramount is moving to establish a stronger presence in Ukraine’s armoured vehicle space, pitching a locally adapted vehicle it says reflects hard lessons from the front lines. The effort is being driven through Paramount Greece, a European subsidiary that gives the company a firmer foothold inside the region’s defence ecosystem and closer proximity to NATO linked supply networks.
The product at the centre of the push is a variant of Paramount’s Mbombe family of mine protected platforms. In Ukraine, it is being presented as the OWL, a configuration described as upgraded for threats that dominate the current battlefield, including artillery fragments, landmines and small arms fire.
Paramount’s local integration work is being handled with a Ukrainian partner, the Military Armored Company HUB, known as MAC HUB. Company representatives have framed the programme as both a manufacturing play and a rapid adaptation cycle, tuned to the realities of a grinding, high attrition conflict.
According to MAC HUB director Oleksandr Dubyna, the OWL is the second and largest model in the group’s lineup and was developed over an 18 month engineering cycle with Paramount Greece. A designer involved in the project described the vehicle’s construction as central to its protection profile, saying it was designed around a welded monocoque chassis.
Paramount’s pitch also highlights how modern defence production has become cross border by default. The platform draws on a version linked to the Kalyani M4, produced in India under licence by Bharat Forge, while the Ukraine focused work relies on European and local partnerships to tailor the vehicle for immediate operational needs.
Ichikowitz’s company is making the move as South Africa navigates a sensitive diplomatic posture on the Russia Ukraine war. Pretoria has argued it follows a policy of non alignment while maintaining relationships with multiple capitals. Paramount’s expansion into Ukraine underlines how private firms can pursue international opportunities that are not neatly aligned with the country’s geopolitical balancing act.
The push comes with its own complications. Paramount filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States in 2024, listing assets of $500 million to $1 billion against liabilities of $100 million to $500 million, according to the report. The company has continued seeking international contracts despite that court process.
Ichikowitz founded Paramount in 1994 and built it into a business that markets armoured vehicles, aircraft, naval systems and other defence technologies. In public appearances over the years, he has often cast African defence manufacturing as both an industrial opportunity and a strategic necessity, arguing that local capability should not be an afterthought in a world where supply chains can be disrupted overnight.
Ukraine, meanwhile, has become a proving ground for the rapid evolution of armoured protection. Manufacturers are racing to respond to ubiquitous drones, widespread mining, and artillery saturation, all while governments look for scalable production, reliable maintenance, and fast delivery. Paramount’s OWL push is aimed squarely at that intersection, where speed matters almost as much as specifications.
