Despite pandemic, top defence firms get richer in 2020

Two Indian defence companies figure among the top 100 defence companies that made profits in 2020 where US and Chinese defence companies lead the list, writes senior journalist Sanjib Kr Baruah.

New Delhi: The coronavirus pandemic may have brought the world to a standstill in 2020 as far as economic activity is concerned, but not for companies making weapons, military platforms and related equipment where business only got better.

According to a list of the top 100 defence firms brought out by defensenews, US and Chinese defence companies led the list in 2020, where six of the 10 largest US defence companies had revenues surging by at least 6 percent—adding up to about $11 billion—while all seven Chinese firms fared impressively.

Defensenews is a portal on politics, business, and technology of defence with wide global readership of senior military, government, and industry decision-makers. The Top 100 list was compiled from companies, from their annual reports, from analysts, research, think-tanks’ data and SPADE Indexes.

The top five companies are from the US—Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics.

Leading the list of top Chinese companies are Aviation Industry Corporation of China, China North Industries Group, China State Shipbuilding Corporation, and China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation.

In the top 20 are eight US companies, seven Chinese, one each from US, Italy, Russia, France, while one is a joint France-Netherlands company.

Two India companies also figure in the list. While Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) climbed a few notches from rank 45 last year to rank 41 this year, Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) stayed stable at rank 61.

For HAL, defence revenues surged an impressive 11 percent over 2019 while BEL clocked a 4 percent rise.

In another indication that the defence industries are going great guns, the 100th ranked firm on the list had about $600 million in defence revenues, while in 2019, the last company on the list had about $300 million. About ten years back, 15 companies had $5 billion in defence revenue, now at least 24 companies have more revenues than that.

In an indication of where the future of defence technology is headed, the new additions of companies on the list are largely those pertaining to cyber, space, satellite imagery, sensor and other emerging technology domains.