Dual-use, Gdynia style: WB Group's AREX, from a naval weapon station to a seaside EV charger

As the summer season opened on the Polish coast, a compact electric-car charger went live at a seaside hotel in Ustka. On the face of it, a minor dot on Pomerania's e-mobility map. Except that the company behind it had, only months earlier, unveiled the naval version of a remote weapon station at Poland's largest maritime-and-defence trade fair. Same company, same engineers in Gdynia.

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25 june 2026   |   16:26   |   Source: Gazeta Morska   |   Prepared by: Kamil Kusier   |   Print

fot. Mariusz Jasłowski

One company, two worlds

AREX, formally Zakład Automatyki i Urządzeń Pomiarowych AREX Sp. z o.o., is a technology company based in Gdynia. Since 2011 it has belonged to WB Group, Poland's largest privately owned defence group, whose members include WB Electronics, Flytronic, Radmor and MindMade. The company works two markets in parallel, civilian and military, and describes itself as a leader in technologies for the rail, e-mobility and defence sectors, with more than 35 years behind it.

That duality is not a marketing flourish but the operating model of WB Group as a whole: full integration of competences and a shared product offer and sales channels across several companies. In practice, it means that the same team designing precision electronics for the military also develops chargers for municipal bus depots.

A naval pedigree

For a maritime-industry reader, it is that first, hard pillar that is the most interesting. At the 23rd International Maritime and Defence Fair BALTEXPO 2025 in Gdańsk, WB Group presented in the maritime domain, among other things, the naval variant of the ZMU-05N remote weapon station developed by AREX, the kind of solution designed with a vessel's deck in mind.

It is not the company's first maritime footprint. AREX has also carried out an in-house modernisation of 23 mm naval artillery mounts, documented in the Polish Naval Academy's Maritime Security Yearbook. Put differently: the firm that has just installed a wallbox outside a seaside hotel also works, day to day, on naval armament.

Defence-grade standards on the civilian market

The second pillar is e-mobility and power engineering, and this is where AREX is growing fastest. The ACX-1W unit in Ustka belongs to the ACX line of AC chargers; alongside it the company offers DC fast chargers from the DCX family rated from 80 up to 240 kW, as well as mobile DCX-Mobile units for bus fleets. In January, the ACX series obtained a certificate of compatibility with the EcoStation platform under the OCPP 1.6 standard, opening the way to integration with operator systems.

The contracts back the claims. In recent months alone, AREX has won tenders to supply depot chargers for Włocławek (16 units), and mobile stations for the municipal transport operator in Stargard and for PKS Nova in the Podlaskie region. The common denominator is the product's Polish origin. As Oskar Kreft, AREX's director for the e-conversion market, put it:

- We have full control over them, and all production takes place in Poland.

The company likes to stress that it carries over to the civilian market the quality standards once demanded in the defence sector, from mechanics, through electronics, to software.

The market has taken note. WB Group's stand showcasing AREX solutions won a Top Design distinction at the ENEX fair, the company collected awards at the TRAKO 2025 rail exhibition, and it placed third in the Pomeranian voivodeship in the 2025 Gazele Biznesu (Business Gazelles) ranking.

Why it matters for the maritime economy

In miniature, the AREX story captures a phenomenon that is increasingly defining the Pomeranian economy: dual-use, technologies straddling the civilian and military worlds. It is no accident that BALTEXPO, for more than four decades the most important gathering of Poland's maritime industry, today brings shipyards, the navy, unmanned systems and critical-infrastructure security under one roof. The line between maritime and defence, and between military and civilian, is blurring ever further.

For Pomerania, this has a very concrete dimension. The Tricity, the Gdańsk-Gdynia-Sopot metro area, is home to an engineering base capable of designing a naval weapon module, an energy-storage unit and a fast charger alike. The maritime economy is now entering an electrification phase, from ports, through propulsion, to the back-end of offshore wind farms. In that context, such competence becomes a genuine regional asset.

Will it also flow towards the electrification of quays and vessels? AREX has made no such announcement, and it would be premature to attribute those plans to the company. But its very profile, power engineering, charging and energy storage, with a naval pedigree on top, makes for an intriguing hypothesis. One thing is certain: a Gdynia firm that is easy to overlook behind a short post about a charger outside a hotel is playing in a far more serious league than it might appear.

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AREX Grupa WB elektromobilność przemysł obronny technologie dual-use

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