r/dataisbeautiful • u/Proud-Discipline9902 • 2d ago
OC [OC]Top 20 Global Defense Contractors by Market Capitalization
Methodology & scope:
- Universe: Publicly traded companies with ≥25% of revenue from defense‑related products/services.
- Source: Market capitalization (USD) as of Aug 2025, sourced from MarketCapWatch, Nasdaq’s 2025 defense stock review, and Forbes’ 2025 defense picks, cross‑checked with recent filings.
- Inclusions: Dual‑sector aerospace & defense firms (e.g., Boeing, Safran) where defense is a major revenue driver.
- Exclusions: Fully private/state‑owned entities (e.g., Rostec, NORINCO) without a listed arm.
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u/stewmander 2d ago
I count 7 US, 8 European, and 4 Asia-Pacific companies in the chart.
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u/today_i_burned 2d ago
Yeah, but I don't see you giving OP credit for getting the 1 Middle East count correct.
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u/Was0ry 2d ago
There are a few mistakes here, Dassault should be behind Kongsberg and General Dynamics should be behind Rheinmettal and Northrop.
Another comment also pointed out the number of companies of each continent is false.
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u/Prestigious-Wait-4 1d ago
Airbus is missing altogether, even though military sales volume is comparable to Boeing and market capitalization roughly the same.
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u/ramjithunder24 1d ago
Same with Hanwha Aerospace, which should be at around 32bil usd
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u/Siguard_ 19h ago
I think he only was looking at nyse stocks. As hanwha is only traded on the Korean market.
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u/jgtxreon 2d ago
As a French I would've thought that dassault would have the bigger market cap between them and Thales / Safran
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u/dede_le_saumon 1d ago
Safran makes most of its revenue from CFM which is civil aircraft engines. Defense is only a small subset of their business. Not sure which figure is represented here, global or defense only.
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u/Rexpelliarmus 1d ago edited 1d ago
Why would you include Safran but not Rolls-Royce? Rolls-Royce has a market capitalisation of $88B putting it ahead of General Dynamics, Rheinmetall and behind Lockheed Martin.
Rolls-Royce is the UK's premier engine manufacturer and was the primary designer of the EJ200 engines in the Eurofighter and will also design the engines that'll power the fighter that comes out of GCAP. They're also the sole company responsible for designing the PWR reactors in British SSBNs and SSNs. Rolls-Royce are also the ones that provide most of the gas turbines in British warships. They have a pretty significant defence business.
But, in all honesty, defence consolidating into these massive companies is a terrible thing. We shouldn't want such massive defence companies because there is now barely any actual competition between defence firms for contracts which is why defence acquisition costs in most Western countries has skyrocketed since the end of the Cold War.
Why would Lockheed Martin or Rheinmetall or BAE Systems bother being cost competitive when they know they're too big to fail and the government will basically buy whatever they shit out? If not this contract then definitely some other contract because the government needs to give them some work regardless of its quality else they'll go under and that's a "national security risk".
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u/suedepaid 1d ago
I think you have the causation backwards here — defense consolidated because Western countries cut defense budgets post-Cold War.
High acq costs are the result of shrinking budgets. You can get stuff cheap when you buy a lot of it. When you only buy like, 10 missiles a year, those missiles are gonna be really expensive. Or, you lose the ability to make missiles.
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u/Rexpelliarmus 1d ago
No, because even things the West still procured in large numbers got more expensive because competition dwindled and these companies got complacent in their role.
The US is paying contractors thousands for bolts, screws and freaking coffee machines. It’s corporate profiteering because the government has no other option.
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u/suedepaid 1d ago
A lot of those examples are quite overblown when you dig into them. In many cases, what’s actually happening is something like:
- govt requires a certain bolt/screw
- the world changes and the original screw manufacturer stops making it
- contractor requests funds to re-certify platform design/build with new parts
- govt denies it because of color-of-money problems
- platform continues to be built with old, outdated screw (now bespoke, limited-run-order which costs $1000 per part)
In any case, there’s rarely profiteering, instead its customer requirements leading to brutally expensive outcomes.
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u/Krossrunner 1d ago
As a RYCEY holder I was wondering the same thing, Rolls should be fairly high up on the list but their completely excluded…..
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u/chrisni66 2d ago
Wow, Rheinmetall overtook BAE. I knew their share price was doing well, but I didn’t realise it was doing that well
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u/Tilting_Gambit 2d ago
Off the back of the European countries pushing defence after Russia - Ukraine. Very interesting to see it visualised though.
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u/Drumbelgalf 1d ago
Germany has increased its military budget quite a bit and lots of contracts went to Rheinmetall. Germany orderd 1000 tanks and 2500 GTK-Boxer for about 25 billion euros. Germany also orderd Artilery ammunition for 8.5 Billion
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u/JanB1 2d ago
Honeywell? I thought they only made mediocre sensors and code readers...
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u/FreeUsernameInBox 1d ago
Anything defence related has at least one sensor on it, usually a lot more. And there's a considerable overlap between 'mediocre' and 'lowest qualifying bid'.
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u/IBJON 1d ago
They make a lot of stuff for the military. Parts for missiles like systems needed to guide missiles, tank engines, components for jets and helicopters, etc.
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u/IseeNekidPeople 1d ago
Honeywell also makes a lot of industrial manufacturing equipment. Everyone thinks of the actual products that these large defense contractors build and sell, you also have to think about the manufacturing facilities that actually make the parts for these overall products.
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u/smashed__ 1d ago
They make the T55 engine which is used on helicopters like the chinook. They also make APU’s, but that may be more commercial than military.
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u/nojusticenopeaceluv 1d ago
This is what happens when you use AI to make this garbage and don’t actually check anything yourself.
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u/AutisticProf 1d ago edited 17h ago
The 25% threshold leaves a big variance for how defense oriented companies are. Like I think Honeywell & Boeing are under 50% defense while others are much more focused on defense.
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u/Mid_Atlantic_Lad 2d ago
That's actually insane that RTX overmatches Boeing. Yes, they have major non military segments of the business, but that's still crazy since it's Boeing we're talking about.
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u/maduste 2d ago
I’m at a vendor working with all of the American companies (and BAE), and I’m surprised LMCO isn’t the largest.
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u/Mid_Atlantic_Lad 2d ago
I imagine it's because they're strictly a defense firm, whereas the others have a large presence in the civilian sector, which makes sense for Boeing, but surprised me for RTX, but it turns out that's the case.
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u/maduste 2d ago
I think Lockheed has a little more going on in non-public sector than Raytheon, to my knowledge (which has already proven to be lacking here). But of course, Boeing has a large civilian aerospace business, so I’m not surprised that it’s high on the list. It didn’t surprise me that Raytheon is larger – they’re the prime on some massive defense contracts.
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u/Mid_Atlantic_Lad 2d ago
Well that's the thing, Raytheon is RTX, but RTX isn't Raytheon. RTX includes many subsidiaries, including Pratt & Whitney, which is the 3rd largest jet engine producer in the world, civilian and military, so RTX as a whole is only 53% defense contracts.
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u/maduste 1d ago
Ah, that’s fair, totally slipped my mind. We refer to it as RTX in Slack and email, but say, “Raytheon,” and I’ve conflated them. Now the chart fits my priors, so thanks for that!
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u/Mid_Atlantic_Lad 1d ago
No, you're good. I remember when they changed their name and my first thought was, "well that's gonna confuse people for years to come."
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u/suedepaid 1d ago
Isn’t it largest by contracts? I think the stock’s just down a lot after the bad recent quarter.
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u/taspeotis 1d ago
Boeing’s a bit beleaguered at this point. Their updated 737 MAX (which stands for “sMAX into the ground sometimes”) didn’t do them any favours. Coming off the back of the 787 Screamliner too.
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u/Mid_Atlantic_Lad 1d ago
They're still the only civilian American manufacturer of civil airliners. The company can be massively restructured, but it literally can't fail. It's a national security risk.
The aircraft are still stupidly safe, as aviation is in general. That does not mean, however, that we should not maintain our very high expectations of them, for that is the very reason aviation is so safe.
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u/taspeotis 1d ago
Uh nice try to shift the goalposts from beleaguered public company having a lower-than-historical market cap to “too big to fail”
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u/Mid_Atlantic_Lad 1d ago
That's a poor use of the term shifting goalposts. Boeing fucked up, and fucked up hard. I never said they were to big to fail, but they are too important to be broken up. At worst the government would step in and make a major restructuring of the company.
Still, aviation is stupidly safe, and anyone who denied this is influenced by dread risk and availability heuristic.
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u/lesllamas 1d ago
I never said they were too big to fail, but they are too important to be broken up.
What exactly do you think it means to be “too big to fail”?
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u/Mid_Atlantic_Lad 1d ago
If being failed, our civilian manufacturing industry would collapse overnight. You can't just have another company buy up the remaining assets and start over, it would cause a ripple throughout the world as aircraft deliveries plummet, and the backorder for 10 thousand aircraft drops as airlines lose faith that they'll get their delivery when they need it. Airlines then go out of business, and the worlds air passenger and cargo industry grinds to a halt, affecting every facet of modern life.
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u/Drumbelgalf 1d ago
Its crazy that Airbus is not included they have a massive defense section just like Boeing. Airbuses marked cap is 142 billion Euro
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u/KunashG 1d ago
Okay, I mean obviously the US is going to town here with $843bln, which is around $2.4k per citizen.
But let's take a moment here to appreciate the Nordics military for once. What's up with Sweden+Norway going at a staggering $3.2k per citizen? That... I did not expect that.
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u/wildjackalope 1d ago
Sweden purposely built and maintained its own defense industry for pretty understandable reasons post WW2, so no surprise there.
The Norwegians make mostly advanced missile tech, especially in the naval sphere, that fill a niche for NATO nations. Those figures are pretty wild when you consider Norway has like 35k active duty in all branches though.
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u/curiouslywtf 1d ago
All defense companies combined pale in comparison to single big tech companies market cap.
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u/Slick_McFavorite1 1d ago
Where are the Russian defense manufactures? They sell weapons all over the world. Pre-Ukraine war the US and Russia where the 2 largest sellers of weapons world wide.
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u/time_drifter 2d ago
I didn’t realize Saab was still an active company. I thought they were shuddered at decade or two ago. Today I see them on a top 20 defense contractor list.
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u/DataStr3ss 2d ago
They are more than relevant, tbh.
Gripen E/F jets
SAAB GlobalEye & EriEye AEW&C
RBS-70 missile
NLAW ATGM are a few of their products that are cutting-edge.
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u/Mid_Atlantic_Lad 2d ago
As stated below, they never went away. Losing Saab would be a national security risk for Sweden, so it would never go under. The car portion is a completely separate company, just like with Rolls Royce. Engines and cars share only in name.
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u/Edvindenbest 2d ago
You're probably thinking about the auto-part of SAAB, they sold their automanufacturing and research and it was basically dismantled (it was bought by their competitor to remove them from the market) but their military parts remained and are as big as ever.
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u/tgwhite OC: 27 1d ago
Presumably Boeing’s market cap isn’t from its defense work.
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u/pocketdare 1d ago edited 1d ago
Using market cap isn't necessarily the best way of "ranking" defense contractors. I suspect what might be more relevant to people is relative size of actual defense contracts. By this metric, NVidia selling chips to the military would make it the world's largest "defense contractor". But I understand that market cap is far easier.
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u/CD-TG 1d ago
Looking at just defense-related revenue for context, Lockheed Martin is the big dog and, wow, it's not even close.
Sorry it's just an Excel chart for this comment post--no time to make it beautiful like the OP--I love the OP's use of logos and flags!
Source: https://people.defensenews.com/top-100/
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u/hopelesscaribou 1d ago
How have I never heard of RTX?
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u/Gardener_Of_Eden 1d ago
It is Raytheon
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u/hopelesscaribou 1d ago
Thank you stranger!
Funny thing is I was looking for Raytheon and was surprised it wasn't there.
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u/lost21gramsyesterday 1d ago
I find it funny that we only use the word "Defense". Never the "Attack industry"...
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u/Terrible-Duck4953 2d ago edited 2d ago
America just throws everyone out of the water when it comes to defense. It's just amazing how powerful the United States is compared to the combined strength of all the other countries in the world. Even Churchill knew WW2 was over when America entered the war. Total Badass.
PS I am not American and have no dog in this fight. Edit : Changed Hitler to Churchill Why the downvotes ??
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u/HarrMada 2d ago
This list isn't about actual military sales or production though. It's market cap, so it's just the total value of the shares of each company.
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u/Terrible-Duck4953 2d ago
Yeah but even then American companies have much bigger revenue and American defense exports than any other country.
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u/nous_serons_libre 2d ago
Well no Hitler didn't know that, he even declared war on the US with enthusiasm
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u/Lepsis 1d ago
If anyone else is confused at who RTX is, apparently Raytheon changed their name