The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) is, in their own words, an independent international institute dedicated to research into conflict, armaments, arms control and disarmament. Every year they publish their famous SIPRI Yearbook with data about international conflicts, defence spending, defence companies…
In a previous post I showed cartograms of countries relative to their defence spending, etc. In this post I want to show a bit about the industry.
From the information of last year’s book, we find that of the 10 world biggest defence companies 6 are US companies and 4 European, though the biggest one is the British BAE Systems.
Among the first hundred companies (121 including subsidiaries) there are 4 Spanish: CASA (EADS), Navantia, Indra and Santa Barbara (General Dynamics). This places Spain as the 7th country by number of large defence companies. SIPRI publishes as well a fact sheet titled “Trends in International Arms Transfer”; in that one (data from 2005-2009) Spain is placed as the 8th country by arms exports.
Countries by number of large defence companies.
Countries by defence sales.
Finally, with the information provided by SIPRI I built the following (simplified) table where you may see which are the biggest defence companies by revenues and see how much of their business is relying on defence activities (big conglomerates like GE or UTC do not rely heavily on defence).
Defence companies by defence revenues and reliance on defence.
It is also interesting to look at the previous picture but isolating only the US companies…
US Defence companies by defence revenues and reliance on defence.
… and then taking a look at European ones:
European Defence companies by defence revenues and reliance on defence.
You may see that the top-right corner is almost exclusive domain of US companies, except for BAE, which has a big presence in the US defence market.
In this latest table you would see how the complete picture (with all 121 companies) would look like, with an atomization of smaller companies at the bottom.
Complete picture with 121 companies.
The Blog by Javier 
From my browsing their pages, they only list arms sellers. I say that because I didn’t find Halliburton that in my book is a “defence” company as anybody else in the world.
You’re completely right, David. I should have indicated arm sellers. Halliburton and other services companies are not included in the list, even though for arms sellers they do include the share of revenues related to defence services as arms sales.
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