Turkey’s defence industry is booming


Indonesia has announced it’ll purchase 12 Turkish-made ANKA drones for $300M, with the first shipment expected to arrive in November 2025.

Drones have become some of Turkey’s highest-profile exports. Just in the last month:

  1. 🇰🇼 Kuwait purchased $367M of TB2 drones from the firm Baykar
  2. 🇽🇰 Kosovo also bought an undisclosed number of TB2s, and
  3. 🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia sealed Turkey’s largest ever defence export deal, buying ~$1B worth of Baykar’s newer Akinci drones.

Plus, there are another 30 countries that own and operate Turkish drones, which have appeared on battlefields around Libya, Azerbaijan, Syria, Ukraine and beyond.

Intrigue’s take: You can see why Turkey’s drones are popular – they’re durable, effective, and cheap. Hence their reputation as the ‘Toyota Corolla of drones’.

And Turkey itself benefits, too: it needs the export revenue, plus having nations dependent on it for defence kit gives Ankara leverage.

Also worth noting:

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