Brazil's antitrust authority, the Cade, cleared on Monday (Sept. 14) the purchase of Nova AVB, the structure that controls Avibras, by Globe Investimentos, a company owned by brothers Joesley and Wesley Batista, the family behind meat giant JBS. The deal was filed with the regulator in August, and its value remains confidential, news site G1 reports.

Cade's technical staff classified the transaction as a "replacement of an economic agent". Globe had no prior operations in defense or in markets adjacent to Avibras, so there is no horizontal overlap and no vertical integration. In practical terms, the purchase does not combine two competitors and does not put different links of one production chain under the same command. A window for challenges is still open; if no appeal is filed, the approval becomes final and the deal can close.

What the factory makes

Avibras works in defense and space and produces artillery systems, missiles, rockets and anti-aircraft solutions. According to the filing cited by Folha de S.Paulo, those are exactly the lines that interest the Batista brothers, above all the Astros artillery system operated by the Brazilian Army, whose 2020 version was developed by the company itself. Missiles, rockets, space vehicles and civil solutions such as boosters and training rockets are also on the list. The plant in Jacarei, in Sao Paulo state's Vale do Paraiba region, resumed operations in May.

The restart followed a restructuring that had already changed owners once. Avibras entered judicial recovery, Brazil's court-supervised debt restructuring akin to Chapter 11, in March 2022 and sat idle for about three years after employees went on strike over unpaid wages, G1 reports. In 2025, Brasil Credito took control by buying the debt of a former Indonesian shareholder, in a deal with Joao Brasil Carvalho Leite, son of the founder. Industrial and technological assets were then pooled into Nova AVB, while the original company kept the liabilities under judicial recovery.

The money and the ruling

Globe is the family office of the Batista brothers and sits outside the J&F conglomerate, which includes JBS, power company Ambra Energia, pulp maker Eldorado and Banco Original, according to Folha. In the filing with Cade, the buyers asked for a fast-track review and framed the purchase as an entry ticket into national defense and aerospace, saying it would contribute "to the restructuring and strengthening of these activities in Brazil". They also told the regulator:

"The transaction is simple and incapable of producing competitive effects, notably the absence of horizontal overlap and vertical integration between the activities of the requesting parties in the relevant markets involved."

For the production side, the approval hands the Jacarei plant a new owner that has pledged, in the filing, to back the revival of the activity in Brazil. For the buying side, little changes: the Army keeps the same artillery supplier, now under different control, and competition in the defense market, in Cade's reading, stays untouched. What remains unknown is the price: the deal's value is still under seal.