ASELSAN, ROKETSAN Sign €1.23 Billion Air Defence Deal
ASELSAN has signed a contract worth €1,234,210,000 to supply sub-components for air defence systems to fellow Turkish state-linked manufacturer ROKETSAN, the company disclosed on September 23 through Türkiye’s Public Disclosure Platform (KAP), the mandatory filing system for companies listed on Borsa Istanbul.
The filing is short. It names ROKETSAN as the customer, states the contract value, and says the deal covers “the supply of sub-components for air defence systems.” It does not identify which programme the components are destined for, how many units are involved, or when deliveries are due. ASELSAN said only that the agreement would have a positive effect on the company’s revenue.
That reticence is standard practice for KAP filings between two firms that are both, in effect, arms of the same state industrial base — ASELSAN is majority-owned by the Turkish Armed Forces Foundation, and ROKETSAN’s principal shareholder is the Defence Industry Support and Pension Fund tied to the Secretariat of Defence Industries (SSB). But the size of the sum, more than €1.2 billion, makes this one of the larger disclosed subcontracts between the two companies this year and has drawn attention in Turkish financial media as a likely down payment on the next phase of Türkiye’s layered air defence build-out.
A supply deal inside Çelik Kubbe
Neither company has confirmed the connection publicly, but the timing and scale point toward Çelik Kubbe (Steel Dome), the multi-layer air defence architecture SSB has been assembling since 2023 to protect Turkish airspace against cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, loitering munitions and drones simultaneously. ASELSAN and ROKETSAN sit on opposite ends of that architecture’s supply chain in a way that fits the KAP description: ASELSAN builds the radars, electro-optical sensors, command-and-control software and much of the electronic-warfare backbone that detects and tracks threats, while ROKETSAN builds the interceptor missiles — the SUNGUR man-portable and vehicle-mounted missile, the HİSAR-A and HİSAR-O families, and the long-range SİPER system developed jointly with TÜBİTAK SAGE — that shoot them down.
A contract in which ROKETSAN is the buyer and ASELSAN the supplier is therefore consistent with ASELSAN providing seekers, guidance electronics, fire-control components or other subsystems that go into ROKETSAN-built missiles and launchers, rather than a finished weapons order running the other way. That reading fits the pattern set in November 2025, when SSB signed roughly $6.5 billion in contracts with ASELSAN, HAVELSAN and ROKETSAN to expand Çelik Kubbe, covering everything from ground radars and electro-optical sensors to short-, medium- and long-range missile batteries under a single command-and-control layer. This week’s €1.2 billion order could represent a tranche of that wider programme being placed between the two subcontractors. Until either company issues a more detailed statement, though, that link remains informed inference rather than confirmed fact.
Why it matters beyond the balance sheet
For a market audience, the filing is a revenue event: ASELSAN, Türkiye’s largest defence electronics group by turnover, books a contract that will flow through several years of production. But the more interesting read for defence planners is what it says about the maturity of Türkiye’s domestic air defence supply chain. Çelik Kubbe was conceived explicitly as a Turkish answer to the layered air defence concepts NATO allies and other powers have pursued — Israel’s Iron Dome and Arrow tiers, the European Sky Shield Initiative, and the US Army’s push toward integrated air-and-missile defence — but built almost entirely from domestic components rather than imported ones.
A €1.2 billion subcomponent order moving between two Turkish companies, rather than being placed with a European or American sensor or seeker supplier, is the kind of transaction SSB officials point to when they describe Türkiye’s defence sector as having crossed from assembly and licensed production into genuine systems integration. It also reduces the number of external dependencies — and export-control exposure — in a programme Ankara has started to market abroad, including to Gulf and Central Asian partners assessing layered air defence options of their own.
The deal lands three days after SSB reported that Turkish defence and aerospace exports reached $11 billion in the first nine months of 2026, with local content averaging 83 percent across the sector — a figure air defence systems, with their historically heavy reliance on imported seekers and radar components, have lagged behind. Whether this contract signals a narrowing of that gap will only be clear once ASELSAN or ROKETSAN disclose more about what is actually being supplied.
What to watch
Investors and defence-industry trackers will be watching ASELSAN’s and ROKETSAN’s next quarterly disclosures for a breakdown of the contract’s scope, and for whether SSB references it when it next updates the public on Çelik Kubbe’s integration timeline, which also includes the TF-2000 air-defence destroyer programme’s radar and combat-management requirements. For now, the confirmed facts are narrow: a euro-denominated contract, a September 23 signing date, and two Turkish primes doing business with each other at a scale that outstrips most of the export contracts Türkiye’s air defence sector has announced with foreign customers this year.
Neither company had published further detail beyond the KAP filing at the time of writing.
