, according to Companies Market Cap, a financial data website that tracks listed companies worldwide, as a sharp rally in its shares coincided with record defense orders and export contracts.){kind=link}
Turkey’s defense electronics giant ASELSAN has become the country’s most valuable publicly traded company, with a market capitalization exceeding 2 trillion lira ($44.4 billion), according to Companies Market Cap, a financial data website that tracks listed companies worldwide, as a sharp rally in its shares coincided with record defense orders and export contracts.
ASELSAN shares reached 442 lira ($9.70) on Borsa İstanbul, Turkey’s main stock exchange, bringing their gains since the start of the year to about 90 percent. The company had crossed the 1 trillion lira threshold in September 2025.
ASELSAN reported 180.4 billion lira ($4 billion) in revenue for 2025, a 15 percent real increase, and raised its order backlog to $20.4 billion, according to its annual report. The company said it signed 272 export contracts worth in excess of $2 billion in 2025, more than double the previous year’s total.
The rise in ASELSAN shares comes as defense industry stocks attract strong investor interest on Borsa İstanbul amid higher global military spending and growing demand for air defense, electronic warfare and drone-related systems.
Founded in 1975 after the US arms embargo that followed Turkey’s 1974 invasion of Cyprus, ASELSAN was established to reduce the country’s reliance on foreign military technology. The Ankara-based company is majority-owned by the Turkish Armed Forces Foundation, known by its Turkish acronym TSKGV, which owns 74.2 percent of its shares.
Originally focused on military radios, ASELSAN has expanded into radar, electronic warfare, command-and-control, avionics, secure communications and space technologies. Its systems are used in air defense, military aircraft, unmanned platforms and naval platforms.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks global military spending and the arms industry, ranked ASELSAN 47th in its 2024 list of the world’s largest arms-producing and military services companies. Defense News placed the company 43rd in its 2025 Top 100 list.
In 2025 ASELSAN signed export contracts in 58 countries, including three new markets, bringing the total number of countries it has supplied to 95. Among the deals was a $410 million contract to export electronic warfare systems to NATO member Poland.
In Turkey, ASELSAN is one of the main companies involved in the Steel Dome air defense architecture, a system intended to provide layered protection against threats including drones, aircraft and missiles by integrating land and sea-based air defense components.
Its systems are also used in major aviation programs, including KAAN, Turkey’s domestically developed fifth-generation fighter jet, and Bayraktar KIZILELMA, a jet-powered unmanned combat aircraft developed by drone maker Baykar.
According to the company’s annual report, a 2025 KIZILELMA test used ASELSAN’s MURAD active electronically scanned array radar to mark a target that was later hit by GÖKDOĞAN, a domestically developed air-to-air missile developed by TÜBİTAK SAGE.
ASELSAN also moved into low Earth orbit satellite services, with its LUNA-1 Internet of Things satellite launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in late 2025. The company said the satellite later sent its first telemetry data to a ground station in Ankara.
The company spent 53.96 billion lira ($1.2 billion) on research and development in 2025, up 69 percent from the previous year. Exports accounted for 25 percent of ASELSAN’s deliveries in 2025, up from 19 percent in 2024.