The Aselsan Playbook

You can own a piece of the world's 43rd-largest defense company from your phone, for about ten dollars a share. It trades in the open, next to the banks and the beverage makers. And this year it passed all of them: a defense electronics manufacturer became the most valuable company listed on its national stock exchange, crossing a market value of two trillion lira.

Most companies in this business are private, state-owned, or buried inside a conglomerate you'll never see report a number. This one has published its quarterly results to public shareholders since 1990. It sits on an order book of 20.4 billion dollars — roughly five years of revenue already sold. It reinvests more than a billion dollars a year into research. And it did all of this without ever leaving the control of the foundation that started it.

This is the business behind the hardware. Not what Aselsan builds, but how it built a fifty-year compounding machine — and the moves an operator can steal from it.

In 1990, Aselsan did something almost no defense manufacturer does: it listed its shares on a public exchange and invited outside investors in. Fifteen years old at the time, it opened roughly a quarter of itself to the market while its founding foundation, the TSKGV, held the rest.

That structure never changed. Today the foundation still owns 74.2 percent. The remaining free float trades openly, which means anyone — a pension fund, a retail investor, a rival's analyst — can buy in, read the filings, and price the company every single day.

The genius is in what the split protects. Public capital funds a business that eats cash: fabrication lines, test facilities, decade-long programs. But a controlling block above 74 percent means no activist, no hostile bid, and no quarterly-earnings mob can force a short-term decision on a long-term business. Aselsan gets the discipline and liquidity of a listed company without the vulnerability.

Most founders treat "go public" and "stay in control" as a trade. Aselsan proved you can structure your way out of the trade — float the minority that funds you, ring-fence the majority that steers you.

Takeaway: Sell the slice that funds the mission. Never sell the slice that decides it.

In 2025 Aselsan spent more than 1.2 billion dollars on research and development — a figure that has grown faster than its revenue, and that runs at roughly a quarter to a third of the top line depending on the year. It operates eleven dedicated research centers and employs more than 7,500 people whose entire job is to invent what the company will sell in five years.

Read that ratio again. A hardware manufacturer plowing a quarter-plus of sales back into R&D is behaving like a software company, not a metal-bender. Most defense contractors let the customer fund development through cost-plus contracts and keep their own R&D lean. Aselsan does the opposite: it carries the invention risk itself, then owns the intellectual property outright.

That choice is why it can walk into a negotiation owning the design rather than renting it — and why its catalog keeps widening while competitors wait to be told what to build.

Takeaway: If you fund your own R&D, you own the roadmap. If the customer funds it, they do.

Aselsan's most important number isn't revenue. It's the order book: 20.4 billion dollars at the end of 2025, up from 14 billion a year earlier. Against annual sales of roughly 4 billion dollars, that backlog represents about five years of work already contracted and signed.

This is the quiet architecture of a capital-heavy business done right. A backlog that dwarfs revenue turns a lumpy, program-driven company into something closer to a subscription: predictable, financeable, and durable through a bad year. It lets Aselsan invest in a factory today against revenue it will collect in 2029. It lets lenders and shareholders underwrite the future with confidence, because the future is already on the books.

Founders obsess over this quarter's bookings. Aselsan built a machine that sells four and five years forward, so the quarter takes care of itself.

Takeaway: A backlog bigger than your revenue is not a vanity metric. It's your cost of capital, your factory financing, and your recession insurance in one line.

For most of its life, Aselsan sold mostly to one customer at home. That is the structural weakness of the whole industry: one buyer, one budget cycle, one point of failure. Aselsan spent the last decade dismantling that dependence.

In 2025 it signed 272 export contracts worth more than 2 billion dollars across 58 countries, bringing its all-time customer base to 95 countries. International deliveries jumped 89 percent to 958 million dollars, and exports climbed to 25 percent of everything it shipped — up from 19 percent a year before. The trend line is the whole point: every new country added is one less quarter that hinges on a single buyer's calendar.

An operator lesson hides in the sequence. Aselsan didn't chase exports first and build competence later. It built a deep home base, proved the products, then used that proof to diversify the revenue. Home base bought the credibility; exports bought the resilience.

Takeaway: Concentration is fine while you're proving the product. Once it's proven, every new customer you add is insurance against the one you can't afford to lose.

Aselsan began as a single-product company. Fifty years later it spans communications, sensing, avionics, command systems, and — as of late 2025 — its own satellite in low Earth orbit, which sent its first telemetry back to a ground station in Ankara.

Each expansion followed the same logic: use the cash from the current line to fund the adjacent one, then let the adjacencies compound into a portfolio no single competitor matches across the board. The satellite move is the clearest tell. A company that began by building radios now operates hardware in orbit — not because it drifted, but because fifty years of reinvested R&D made each new domain a short step from the last.

This is the flywheel every durable hardware company eventually needs. One product gets you in the door. A platform of interlocking products is what makes you impossible to rip out.

Takeaway: Ship one product to survive. Build a platform of adjacent products to become un-removable.

None of the above works without engineers, and Aselsan treats its headcount like a capital asset. Its workforce grew 18 percent in 2025 to around 14,000, adding more than 2,000 people in a single year. Buried in that number: 137 employees who came back to work in Ankara after building careers abroad.

That last figure matters more than its size. Reversing brain drain is one of the hardest things a company operating outside the traditional talent hubs can do, and it doesn't happen by accident. It happens when the work is ambitious enough, the R&D budget deep enough, and the trajectory obvious enough that a senior engineer will move continents to join. Aselsan's eleven research centers and its billion-dollar R&D line aren't just building products — they're the recruiting pitch.

Takeaway: Your R&D budget is also your talent magnet. Build somewhere the best people have to move for — and some of them will move home to do it.

Next Monday: a founder who turned down the acquisition offer that would have made the whole team rich — twice — and then watched the acquirer's stock triple. The number he walked away from has a comma in it, and the reason he gave his board fits in one sentence. One archetype closer to the full field guide.

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