Two Turkish companies among top 100 defense firms

ANKARA

Turkish defense and aviation companies Aselsan and Turkish Aerospace (TUSAŞ) were among the world’s top 100 arms companies list.

Aselsan ranked 56th in the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s (SIPRI) 2021 list, down from 53rd in the previous year’s list.

Aselsan’s arms sales stood at $2.16 billion last year, declining slightly from $2.2 billion in 2020. Total sales of the defense company were $2.28 billion and arms sales accounted for 95 percent of the company’s total sales.

Aselsan is Türkiye’s largest defense company. The Turkish Armed Forces Foundation owns a 74.2 percent share of Aselsan, which was established in 1975 to meet the communication needs of the Turkish Armed Forces by national means.

In the first nine months of 2022, Aselsan inked $924 million worth of new contracts, while backlog was $7.6 billion. The company’s nine-month revenues reached 17.7 billion Turkish Liras ($950 million), rising 72 percent from a year ago.

Its net profit leaped 83 percent year-on-year to 5.74 billion liras in January-September.

TUSAŞ climbed from the 107th spot in the 2020 list to rank 84th in the 2021 list. The company increased its revenues from arms sales from $800 million two years to $1.2 billion last year. Total sales of TUSAŞ stood at $1.4 billion of which 86 percent came from arms sales.

Türkiye’s military spending corresponded to 2.1 percent of the country’s GDP last year, whereas it stood at 2.7 percent of national income in 2019.

The Turkish defense and aviation industry’s export revenues increased from $2.3 billion in 2020 to $3.22 billion last year. Export revenues were only $248 million in 2002.

The number of defense projects in Türkiye jumped from 66 in 2002 to 793 in 2021.