“WE HAVE returned to an era of great-power competition, even constant conflict,” warned Britain’s senior military officer, General Sir Nick Carter, in a speech on December 5th. Bad news for most of us—but a tonic for arms dealers. A report published on December 9th by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a think-tank, shows that sales of arms and military services by the 100 largest defence firms (excluding those in China, where data are patchy) totalled $420bn in 2018, up by 47% in real terms since 2002, the first year for which figures are available.
The list testifies to America’s dominance of the global military marketplace. The 43 American companies in the top 100 sold $246bn-worth of arms between them in 2018, making up 59% of the list. This year, for the first time, American firms made a clean sweep of the top five, with over a third of all sales. Lockheed Martin, which makes the F-35 warplane, has held the top slot for a decade; it is followed by Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics. They have been boosted by big mergers and acquisitions in the past year, as well as a substantial increase in defence spending under President Donald Trump.
As European countries re-arm in response to the threat from Russia, their own companies are not doing badly either. European firms account for a quarter of sales on the top-100 list, with eight from Britain, six from France, four from Germany, two from Italy and one apiece from Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Ukraine. British firms’ $35.1bn of sales trumped those of French ones, at $23.2bn, though the figures swing from year to year as contracts for new warplanes are signed and delivered.
Meanwhile, Russia’s state-owned arms industry is a shadow of its Soviet self. Its sales have surged over the past decade, as Vladimir Putin has pumped money into the modernisation of his conventional and nuclear forces. But the boom times seem to be drawing to a close. Many thought that Russia’s decisive intervention in Syria would be the ideal shop-window for its weapons, from Sukhoi jets to Iskander missiles. The country’s biggest arms firm, Almaz-Antey, did indeed enjoy an 18% jump in sales between 2017 and 2018, thanks partly to the export of the S-400 air-defence system, not least to American friends like Turkey and India. But this year Russian sales on the top 100 added up to just $36.2bn—down on the previous year and barely a third of the total clocked up by its Europan rivals.
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December 09, 2019 at 07:00AM
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American firms dominate global weapons sales - Daily chart - The Economist
"sales" - Google News
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