Sarsılmaz: The Turkish Gunmaker Arming 80 Countries
Most coverage of Turkish defence exports goes to drones and missiles. It rarely mentions the company that has, by its own count, put firearms into more than 80 countries and equips the sidearm holsters of Türkiye’s own police and armed forces: Sarsılmaz, a family firearms maker whose roots go back to 1880 and whose Düzce production campus is one of the largest of its kind in Europe.
That combination — a 19th-century pedigree and an export list most Western gunmakers would envy — makes Sarsılmaz one of the better examples of a pattern across the Turkish defence sector: a company far less visible internationally than Baykar or ASELSAN, doing real volume business that barely registers outside the trade press.
From an Ottoman-era workshop to a NATO-scale factory
Sarsılmaz traces its founding to 1880, making it one of the oldest continuously operating firearms manufacturers in the world still under private ownership. The company moved its base of operations to Istanbul in 1956 and today runs its main manufacturing campus in the Düzce Organized Industrial Zone, a 120,000-square-metre site — roughly 40,000 square metres of it under roof — running three production shifts with around 700 employees. It is a scale few private arms makers outside the largest US and European names can match.
The product line has grown well beyond the pistols most people associate with the brand. Alongside the SAR9 handgun family, Sarsılmaz builds the K12 and Punisher shotgun lines, the SAR308 battle rifle and a range of hunting and sporting firearms, and in the 1990s it developed the Kılınç 2000, an indigenous assault rifle project that was evaluated but did not enter Turkish military service. Ahead of SAHA EXPO 2026 in Istanbul this autumn, the company has said it will show a wider “integrated defence ecosystem” that includes a quadruped robotic platform — a step outside pure firearms manufacturing and into the unmanned ground systems space several Turkish land-systems firms are now entering.
Sole domestic supplier, serial exporter
Inside Türkiye, Sarsılmaz is the only privately owned company supplying sidearms to both the Turkish National Police and the Turkish Armed Forces — a position most competitors would need a state-owned rival to match. Between 2019 and 2022 the company delivered more than 180,000 SAR9 pistols to the Turkish Land and Naval Forces, the Coast Guard and the National Police, and at IDEF 2025 it secured a further domestic contract with the Presidency of Defence Industries (SSB) for 84,800 additional 9mm service pistols.
The export side is where the numbers get more interesting for an international audience. Sarsılmaz sells into more than 80 countries, spanning NATO allies, Middle Eastern and African security forces and civilian sporting markets. The clearest sign of how far that reach extends is the United States, usually the hardest market for a foreign gunmaker to crack: the company’s US arm, SAR USA, imports and distributes the SAR9 line domestically, and the SAR9 SOCOM variant — developed with Turkish special forces requirements in mind — has been adopted as a duty sidearm by the Galveston, Texas police department. Sarsılmaz says the SOCOM model has twice been named handgun of the year in the US firearms press, a market where recognition of that kind is not handed out lightly.
SARSILMAZ AT A GLANCE
| Founded | 1880 |
| Main campus | Düzce OIZ — 120,000 m², approx. 700 staff |
| Flagship product | SAR9 striker-fired pistol family |
| Domestic customers | Turkish National Police, Turkish Armed Forces |
| Recent domestic order | 84,800 pistols, SSB contract (IDEF 2025) |
| Export footprint | 80+ countries; US arm: SAR USA |
| US reference customer | Galveston (TX) Police Department — SAR9 SOCOM |
Why a pistol maker matters to the export story
Sarsılmaz will never generate headlines the way a Bayraktar export deal does, and its contract values are a fraction of what Türkiye’s defence and aerospace sector now exports in a single month. But small arms are a useful stress test for how far a country’s defence manufacturing has actually spread: unlike a state-backed missile or drone programme, a firearms maker has to win shelf space against Glock, SIG Sauer, Beretta and CZ on price, reliability and reputation alone, in dozens of separate national procurement processes and open commercial markets. Sarsılmaz doing that at real volume — and doing it well enough to place a sidearm in a US police department, one of the most conservative buyers in the business — says something about the maturity of Turkish manufacturing that a single flagship weapons programme cannot.
It also fits a broader pattern this outlet keeps returning to: Türkiye’s defence-industrial base is not just ASELSAN, Roketsan, TUSAŞ and Baykar. A long tail of smaller, less-covered manufacturers — arms makers, shipyards, component suppliers — is exporting in volume with almost no international press attention, and collectively accounts for a meaningful share of the export growth Ankara likes to cite in its official figures.
