HAL, BEL ride government orders, find place in SIPRI’s list of top 100 global arms making cos

NEW DELHI: There is no business like the arms business. Despite the Covid pandemic and global supply chain disruptions, the sales of weapons and military services by the 100 largest armament firms in the world reached $592 billion in 2021, a 1.9% increase compared with 2020 in real terms.
This is the seventh consecutive year of rising global arms sales. Two Indian defence PSUs, Hindustan Aeronautics (HAL) and Bharat Electronics (BEL), figure in the list of the top 100 arms-producing companies released by Swedish think-tank Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) on Monday.
Both HAL (ranked 42nd with $3.3 billion arms sales) and BEL (63rd with $1.8 billion) have benefitted from the major orders placed by the 1.4-million strong Indian armed forces. The two together, however, accounted for a negligible 0.8% of the $592 billion global arms sales last year.
China has eight firms in the top 100 with total arms sales of $109 billion.
The US continues to overwhelmingly dominate the list, with 40 companies in the top 100 accounting for $299 billion arms sales in 2021. Since 2018, the top five companies in the list are all US-based. The top three are Lockheed Martin ($60 billion arms sales in 2021), Raytheon ($42 billion) and Boeing ($33 billion).
Many parts of the global arms industry are still affected by pandemic-related disruptions in global supply chains in 2021, SIPRI further said.