Lisbon Hosts Europe's Top Aerospace and Defence Executives Next Week as the Continent Rewrites Its Procurement Playbook

A week from today, the Centro de Congressos de Lisboa will host what is shaping up to be the most politically loaded edition of Europe's premier aerospace and defence industry gathering in at least a decade. The ASD Convention 2026, organised by the Aerospace, Security and Defence Industries Association of Europe and co-hosted with AED Cluster Portugal, runs from 27 to 29 April and is expected to draw more than 300 chief executives, policymakers and senior industry figures from across the EU.

Portugal's moment in the calendar

That Lisbon is hosting at all is the result of lobbying that started two years ago, well before Portugal reached NATO's 2 per cent of GDP defence-spending target — a milestone the government now says it has hit four years ahead of schedule. The event is the first major industry convention to land in the country since the April 2025 announcement of the €8.6 billion Microsoft-Start Campus data-centre investment at Sines, and the first since Portuguese drone manufacturer Tekever closed a funding round that took its valuation north of €1 billion in late 2025.

Tekever is the convention's Platinum sponsor. That placement — alongside Gold sponsorships from Brazil's Embraer and the Kreab communications agency, and an exclusive lanyard sponsorship from Coimbra-based Critical Software — is itself a signal. Portuguese industry is using the moment to plant a flag in a sector that Brussels has decided, in the past eighteen months, is strategically too important to leave to market forces.

'Buy European' is the theme everyone is coming to hear

Opening remarks on the main day, Tuesday 28 April, will come from ASD Secretary General Camille Grand — a former Assistant Secretary General at NATO — and from ASD President Micael Johansson, the chief executive of Swedish defence group Saab. Portuguese Infrastructure and Housing Minister Miguel Pinto Luz is scheduled to open the day's SME programme with a speech on small-and-medium enterprise access to the European Defence Fund, the EIC Accelerator, EIF financing and NATO's DIANA innovation pipeline.

The headline plenary is titled Buy European, Build Together. In practice, it is an industry examination of procurement reform: how much of the EU's €150 billion SAFE loan facility and the next Multiannual Financial Framework should flow to European prime contractors versus American primes, how cross-border joint procurement should actually work, and what the Ukraine war has taught Europe about stockpiling, munitions capacity and supply-chain redundancy. A parallel plenary on civil aeronautics places the EU's industrial strategy under the spotlight at a moment when Airbus and Boeing are both constrained on deliveries.

The Portuguese angle

For Portugal, the convention is a showcase and a test. Rear Admiral António Mateu opens the Defence and Security session, José Neves of AED Cluster Portugal delivers welcoming remarks on the Monday evening reception, and Portuguese companies across unmanned systems, satellite services, composite materials and cyber will brief policy delegations from the European Commission and from national ministries.

Whether Lisbon can convert the week into concrete industrial wins — new subcontracts, joint-venture announcements, location decisions on European programmes — will not be clear until well after the delegates have flown home. What is clear is that the conversation European defence is having this April is an uncomfortable one: the continent knows it is under-armed, cannot rely on Washington in the way it once did, and does not yet have the industrial base to fill the gap. Twenty-six kilometres from the ocean that bore Portugal's first empire, three hundred executives will spend two days arguing about how quickly, and how collectively, the next one gets built.

Sources: ASD — Aerospace, Security and Defence Industries Association of Europe; AED Cluster Portugal; Portugal Global; Empreendedor.com.