ASELSAN’s Order Backlog Tops $30 Billion for First Time
ASELSAN’s order backlog passed $30 billion for the first time in the company’s history during the third quarter of 2026, as Türkiye’s largest defence electronics manufacturer reported a jump in quarterly profit that beat analyst forecasts by roughly a quarter. The figures, disclosed to Turkey’s Public Disclosure Platform (KAP) on October 27, show a company whose order book is now growing far faster than its sales, leaving delivery execution rather than demand as the main question for the next two years.
Net profit attributable to shareholders reached 11.23 billion lira ($270 million at current rates) in the July-September quarter, up 82 percent from 6.18 billion lira a year earlier and 25 percent above the second quarter. Thirteen brokerages had put the median forecast at 8.9 billion lira, so the result landed about 26 percent above consensus. Quarterly revenue rose 35 percent year on year to 58.06 billion lira, with gross profit climbing to 17.83 billion lira from 12.47 billion lira.
For the first nine months of 2026, ASELSAN booked 151.5 billion lira in revenue, up 28 percent in real terms, and 26.47 billion lira in net profit, up 75 percent. EBITDA for the period reached 40.6 billion lira, 38 percent higher than a year earlier, with margin expanding roughly 190 basis points to 26.8 percent.
Backlog Growth Is Outrunning Sales
The headline number for an international audience is the order backlog, which SavunmaSanayiST reported at $30.7 billion, up $7.5 billion in a single quarter from $23.2 billion at the end of June. It stood at roughly $20 billion at the close of 2025 and $20.7 billion after the first quarter, so three quarters of 2026 added close to $10 billion to the pipeline.
New contracts signed in the first nine months totaled about $14 billion, already the highest annual figure in company history with one quarter left to report. Of that, roughly $4.9 billion was signed in the first half, which implies around $9.1 billion in the third quarter alone. The ratio of new orders to sales — a rough book-to-bill measure — rose to 4.4 from 2.5 a year earlier, meaning ASELSAN is taking on nearly four and a half times what it is currently able to invoice.
General Manager Ahmet Akyol framed 2026 as an inflection point rather than an ordinary growth year. “2026 is a year in which we are not just growing for ASELSAN, but changing the scale of our growth,” he said, according to SavunmaSanayiST. He added that the company’s dollar-denominated third-quarter growth had accelerated from 18 percent in 2024 to 29 percent in 2025 and 42 percent this year.
Exports Rising, But Still a Minority Share
New export contracts rose 34 percent year on year to $1.9 billion in the first nine months, a smaller slice of the $14 billion total than ASELSAN’s domestic air-defence work but a meaningful one for a company whose exports have historically trailed its size. The quarter’s filings line up with a run of contracts ASELSAN has disclosed since late September: a €1.234 billion subcomponent supply deal with ROKETSAN for air defence systems, a €523 million contract with the Defence Industry Presidency (SSB) for a next-generation air and missile defence system, and a $442.5 million radar and counter-drone export contract with an undisclosed foreign buyer. None of those three deals alone explains the quarter’s $9 billion-plus in new business, but together they illustrate where the volume is coming from: layered air and missile defence, radar and counter-drone systems, much of it tied to Türkiye’s Çelik Kubbe (“Steel Dome”) air-defence architecture, in which ASELSAN supplies sensors, interceptors and command systems alongside Roketsan’s missiles.
That architecture has been in the news through October on its own merits. SİPER-2 completed its first mid-flight retargeting test days before the earnings release, and ASELSAN’s KORKUT self-propelled gun system has now reached nine export customers, including Ukraine. The earnings disclosure gives those individual programme milestones a financial frame: Steel Dome-related work is now a large and growing share of what is filling ASELSAN’s order book, not a side project funded out of the defence budget’s margins.
What the Backlog Doesn’t Show
A backlog this size is a statement about future revenue, not a guarantee of it, and ASELSAN’s own figures point to the strain of scaling up. Net debt rose to roughly 55.16 billion lira at the end of September, up sharply from about 35.7 billion lira three months earlier, as the company borrowed to fund capacity expansion. Capital investment reached $684 million in the first nine months, up 228 percent year on year, and R&D spending rose 36 percent to $1.3 billion. Akyol described the company’s priority for the coming period as converting the backlog “into on-time delivery, new capacity and technological superiority” rather than simply booking more orders.
That is the real test for international observers watching Türkiye’s defence-export push: a $30 billion backlog is only as useful as ASELSAN’s ability to turn it into shipped radars, interceptors and electronic-warfare systems on the schedules its customers were promised. Türkiye’s defence industry as a whole has booked over $15 billion in new contracts in 2026, with the Defence Industry Presidency targeting $20 billion by year-end — a target that ASELSAN’s quarter, on its own, has already helped move closer to.
Sources: ASELSAN disclosure to Turkey’s Public Disclosure Platform (KAP), October 27, 2026; SavunmaSanayiST; RotaBorsa; Paratic.
