And with the author's go-ahead (and some stuff they'll be posting later) have a native company of Dumassas.
Ajax industries
"Engineered for the trip ahead"
A newcomer emerging from the wreckage of it's predecessors, Ajax Industries was one of many small companies that formed on Dumassas as result of the local branches of various megacorps leaving/getting looted and/or blown up over the course of three Succession Wars. As the original operators left, the various refit and manufacturing facilities were left abandoned for the local workers to take over and fire back up.
Originally starting as a communal 'cottage industry' keeping the combat vehicle facilities running; they slowly but surely used the knowledge gained by examining the machinery to actually start manufacturing vehicles. Admittedly these were simple ICE-powered civilian vehicles such as farm tractors, transport trucks and so on; but they were still things desperately needed on Dumassas due to the steady decreasing numbers of traders visiting the planet as the Wars dragged on. And with fewer traders, forign equipment and machinery became harder and harder to acquire; forcing everyone to make due with more primitive designs.
Of course Ajax never intended to limit itself solely to civilian equipment. While such items were necessary and a good constant source of capital to 'keep the lights on' there was one item that was always in demand in the Periphery with pirate bands seemingly hiding under every rock; combat vehicles.
Fortunately for Ajax's ambitions, Dumassas was one of the better off Periphery worlds in that it had the facilities to produce modern missiles and ammo while also having facilities that (with some creativity) build combat vehicles and weapons. On the other hand, Ajax simply didn't have any proper combat vehicle schematics to work from and there was only so much you could get from examining Quikscell products and the other few imports that the Planetary Defense Force had managed to 'acquire'.
The plan at first had been to create a series of Technicals using up armored and expanded versions of their farm tractors and/or heavy transport trucks as a basis. Kim and Gaul Enterprises changed this completely when they approached Ajax with a co-project proposal. Because what K specialized in was the modernization of older equipment and technology. In this particular case K was the modernized design of a tank that had not been produced in over 400 years, the Merkava heavy tank. And while the tank was obsolete compared to other models, it was a tried and tested design which was what Ajax truly desired.
While the Merkava IX certainly wasn't a one-tank war-winner, it's inclusion greatly improved the capabilities of the Dumassas PDF with the benefit of requiring no imported components. With the government buying every produced tank (and quietly asking if production rates could be improved) Ajax has been looking into building/purchasing additional factory lines while they (along with other companies) have been looking through K 's blueprint directory to see what other gems might be contained within.
Ajax, Retrotech and Industrial development.
With the success of the Merkava IX and how merchants were snapping up the Hetzer LRM, SwayRide and M113 APC the moment the paint was dry (if not before); Ajax realized Retrotech was something of an unrealized goldmine. Effective military equipment that was (comparatively) cheap and easy to maintain/repair by Periphery worlds? Everybody would want them. Unfortunately for their dreams of essentially gaining the ability to print money, increasing production of the Merkava and/or making new vehicle runs ran into two glaring problems. The first were the limited number of skilled engineers, line workers and other staff needed to run said production lines. Secondly, the best factories on the planet which consisted of old Star League automated/semi-automated lines; were already occupied with various military and civilian products at this point.
Thus if they wanted more factory lines to improve production by an appreciative level, they would need to build more primitive setups which required far more personnel to run. This of course cycled back into their first problem regarding the limited number of properly trained workers. And so Ajax Industries approached the other companies on-planet with similar goals/needs and proposed a venture that might aliviate at least some of their common problems; the creation of a communally-paid for education subsidy that would help improve the growth rate of the educated and skilled workers everyone needed. In exchange there would be an agreement that nobody would outright sabotage anyone else's attempts at recruiting/hiring the new graduates.
While Ajax estimated that this co-venture would solve their manpower issues within a decade or two (assuming nothing went wrong), they felt that this was no reason to rest on their laurels. Even if they couldn't start up new production lines, producing several one-off prototypes for potential products for bug testing etc was certainly in the cards.
Of course the arrival of the Terrans drastically altered their plans and timetables (among many other things).