Five Turkish Defence Firms Crack Global Top 100 List

Five Turkish defence companies have placed among the world’s 100 largest defence contractors in Defense News’ newly published 2026 Top 100 ranking, with ASELSAN, Turkish Aerospace Industries (TUSAŞ), ARCA Savunma, ROKETSAN and MKE posting a combined defence revenue of $14.9 billion for 2025. The result confirms a trend industry watchers have flagged for several years: Turkish primes are climbing the global league table faster than most of their peers, powered almost entirely by exports.

The annual ranking, compiled from audited company disclosures and published by the US trade outlet Defense News, tracks the 100 companies worldwide with the largest defence-specific revenue. This year’s list totalled $700 billion in combined revenue across all 100 firms, up 11.3 percent from $629 billion the previous year — itself a sign of how much military spending has accelerated globally since 2022.

Who moved, and how far

ASELSAN remains Türkiye’s highest-placed company, climbing three spots to 40th after its defence revenue rose about 26 percent year-on-year, from $3.54 billion to $4.46 billion. The Ankara-based electronics group has spent the past two years pushing into radar, electronic warfare and air-defence exports across Africa, the Gulf and Eastern Europe, and that push is now visible in the topline numbers.

ROKETSAN recorded the sharpest rise of the group, jumping seven places to 64th on the back of an 18 percent increase in defence revenue to $2.37 billion. The missile and munitions maker has been one of the more visible faces of Turkish arms exports this year, and it unveiled four new precision-guided systems at SAHA Expo in May.

ARCA Savunma produced the standout move on the list: a first-ever entry at 53rd, after its defence revenue more than quadrupled from $653.2 million in 2024 to just over $3 billion in 2025. That kind of jump from a company few outside the sector had heard of a year ago illustrates how much of Türkiye’s export growth is being driven by mid-tier ammunition and munitions producers rather than the handful of household names.

Not every Turkish entrant moved up. TUSAŞ, the state aircraft and helicopter manufacturer behind the KAAN fighter and HÜRJET trainer, actually slipped one place to 48th — despite growing its own defence revenue by 16 percent, to $3.65 billion. The dip reflects how competitive the table has become: other companies simply grew faster. MKE, the state ammunition and ordnance producer, similarly fell one place to 81st. Both remain comfortably inside the top 100, but the movement is a reminder that rankings are relative, not absolute — a company can grow its business and still lose ground if the field around it is growing quicker.

Why the ranking matters beyond bragging rights

For an international reader, the Defense News Top 100 is one of the few apples-to-apples benchmarks available for comparing defence industrial bases across countries, since it standardises reporting on defence-specific revenue rather than total corporate turnover. Türkiye placing five companies in the table — more than most European mid-sized defence producers — is a proxy for how far its industrial base has scaled since the localisation drive of the 2010s.

The regional comparison is useful context. Poland’s state-owned PGZ group jumped from 54th to 41st on the same list, based on $4.4 billion in revenue, putting it just ahead of ASELSAN in absolute terms but on a steeper growth curve. That puts Türkiye and Poland — two NATO members investing heavily in indigenous production rather than pure imports — on a broadly similar trajectory, distinct from Gulf-funded builders like the UAE’s EDGE Group, which also debuted prominently this year.

All five Turkish companies sit on the governing board of SAHA Istanbul, the industrial cluster that groups more than 1,300 small and medium-sized Turkish defence suppliers under the primes. That cluster model — SMEs building sub-systems and components that feed directly into ASELSAN, ROKETSAN, TUSAŞ, ARCA and MKE production lines — is part of why Turkish export contracting has scaled so quickly: SAHA-linked exhibitions and matchmaking generated roughly $4.5 billion in signed export agreements in 2024, rising to around $8 billion in 2026, according to SAHA Istanbul’s own figures.

The export engine behind the numbers

None of this year’s rankings happened in isolation from Türkiye’s broader export push. The country’s defence and aerospace exports reached a record $10.56 billion in 2025, up 49 percent from $7.1 billion the year before, and are tracking a further double-digit increase through 2026. ASELSAN alone closed 2025 with more than $2 billion in new export contracts — a 104 percent increase on the previous year — including a $410 million electronic-warfare deal with Poland’s armaments agency and smaller air-defence contracts with undisclosed international customers.

Monthly figures tell the same story: Turkish defence and aerospace exports totalled $511 million in August 2026 alone, keeping the sector on pace for another record year. That export intensity is precisely what separates the current wave of Turkish defence growth from a purely domestic procurement story. A company’s position on the Defense News Top 100 is driven by revenue, not by contract announcements or prototype unveilings, so ASELSAN’s and ROKETSAN’s climbs this year reflect cash actually collected from delivered systems — a more conservative measure than the export figures that get quoted at trade shows.

The one caveat worth flagging: Defense News compiles the list from company-reported figures, and not every firm breaks out defence revenue with the same granularity. ARCA Savunma’s fourfold jump, in particular, reflects a company that only recently began separating defence-specific revenue from its broader industrial output, so year-on-year comparisons for newer entrants should be read with some caution even as the headline growth is real.

Sources

• Anadolu Agency: 5 Turkish defense contractors make world’s Top 100 list
• Defense News: Top 100 defense companies, 2026 ranking
• Defense News: Defense firms soar on ample military spending

One further caveat matters for anyone using this list as a measure of Turkish industrial scale: it is not the only “top 100” in circulation, and the other one disagrees. SIPRI’s Top 100 arms-producing and military services companies for 2024, published on 1 December 2025, also found five Turkish firms, but ranked ASELSAN 47th on $3.47 billion, Turkish Aerospace 65th, Baykar 73rd on an estimated $1.9 billion, ROKETSAN 87th and MKE 93rd, for a combined $10.1 billion rather than $14.9 billion. The two lists count different revenue and treat non-disclosing companies differently — SIPRI estimates Baykar’s figure, Defense News leaves it out; ARCA Savunma appears here and not in SIPRI’s list. We set the two rankings against each other, and against Türkiye’s national export accounts, in our analysis of whether Türkiye is a top 10 arms exporter.