Euronaval 2024 – Aselsan expands its naval portfolio and aims to be among the 30 biggest defence companies by the end of this decade
Showing a comprehensive set of capabilities at Euronaval 2024, and unveiling some new ones, Aselsan is aiming high in the next few years to further grow in order to become among the 30 biggest defence companies worldwide, adding new products and exploiting new technologies.
Aselsan, which will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2025, currently employs 11,000 people, which exceeds 15,000 if we count its subsidiaries. “It is a huge team,” Ahmet Akyol, the President and CEO of the Turkish defence industry leader tells EDR On-Line in the company booth at Euronaval 2024. And one of our main strengths is the average age of that team, which is around 33, so it is a promising team looking at the future,” the 42-years old CEO states.
The close links with the Turkish Armed Forces allows Aselsan engineers to acquire a considerable experience and lessons learned in terms of real scenarios, real battlefield, and real challenges. The main focus for Aselsan is defence electronics, covering from underwater acoustic systems to satellite communications, from air defence and radars to optics and guided munitions, the portfolio also covering command and control systems as well as some avionics. “When you look at a frigate, a helicopter, a UAV or a fighter jet, produced by the Turkish industry, they have Aselsan systems on board.
Aselsan is the leading Turkish company in the air defence sector, closely working with some partners such as Roketsan and Tübitak. “Here we are not providing any solution to a main contractor, we are the main leader, and we leverage our experience and a series of new technologies that allow us to work on the Steel Dome, a project recently launched by the government that will lead to a multi-layered defence system protecting our country, the CEO adds.
Being Euronaval a naval exhibition, the discussion quickly switched towards this area. “In the naval business we have four main pillars. The first is to fully equipping main battle ships with our electronics. The second, we are main partners in today’s modernisation programmes for submarine fleet, and we are preparing ourselves to cooperate on national submarine projects. The third area is related to our unmanned surface vehicles and underwater systems. And finally, last but not least, fourth area deals with naval aviation payloads, that we are providing to UAVs as well as to maritime patrol aircraft,” the CEO explains.
One of the key issues is currently the defence against the drones’ threat, and this could clearly be seen looking at the models exhibited in the Aselsan booth at Euronaval. “Our 35 mm Gökdeniz close-in weapon system is in service in Turkey and contracts have been signed with four international customers, and we see a growing demand due to the capacity of our 35 mm airburst ammunition,” Mr. Akyol explains. “We are also integrating the Kangal jammer on Turkish Navy ships, to counter that threat, and at Euronaval we are unveiling our Göksur point missile defence system, which carries 20 missiles, provided by our partner Tübitak,” he adds, “which provides the capability to eliminate target up to 15 km range, which also features an artificial intelligence supported fire control system,” underlining that his company is able to provide all four layers of air defence, from long to very short range.
Another threat for naval ships is the ones that coming from unmanned surface vehicles, USVs in short, and both Gökdeniz and Göksur are effective against those threats. Aselsan is currently working on the fusion between radars, infrared tracking systems (IRST) and sonar signals to be able to cope even with the most difficult challenges posed by semi-submerged USVs, “and on this programme we are currently at TRL 7,” the company CEO tells EDR On-Line.
“This year we finalised two important developments in the naval domain. One is our new 3D multi-beam AESA naval radar known as Cenk, which is optimized for medium-to-long-range high-altitude air and surface surveillance and target designation, with a detection range of up to 400 km and the capability to track up to 500 targets simultaneously. This is now in service on Turkish I-class frigates and we have contracts with two international customers. The other one is our Düfas low frequency towed active sonar system, which I consider a game-changing product as it integrates also a torpedo countermeasure and increases by five the detection range against submarines, being very effective especially in deep waters, and is now in serial production and being deployed on all our Navy combat ships,” Ahmet Akyol explains.
That said, Aselsan is busy in filling up the few gaps still present in its naval portfolio. “We have to work on rotating IRST sensor, and some sonar projects have to be completed. We are also working hard on unmanned platforms; we are the first company to provide unmanned surface vehicles to the Turkish Navy, and we are trying to differentiate payloads as well as to redesign our USVs in order to make them even more stealth, looking also at semi-submerged solutions. The same applies to unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs), and here too we are expanding the payload portfolio. Back to sensors, we have recently signed a contract with SSB for the production of our Engin coastal surveillance radar, which will be deployed along the Turkish coastline to protect our country,” ASELSAN CEO told us.
Looking at technologies, the company is integrating AI in all its products. “At Aselsan AI is a horizontal technology. We have a roadmap for AI insertion as well as an action plan, and we are looking very carefully to ethic issues. AI must help operators, and it will do so in the next generation of radars, sonars and air defence systems, our ethic committee is keeping a close eye on those applications,” he strongly underlines.
Aselsan established close links with academia and, besides AI, is working with three research universities on different subjects, such as quantum computing, lasers and high-power microwave (HPM) applications. “I consider that lasers and HPM systems will become key in countering swarm attacks both in the naval and land domains, as we currently still have some deficiencies to neutralising such threat. Both technologies are very promising, and we are starting deploying some initial products,”
While being one of the major providers to Turkish Armed Forces, Aselsan is also looking at the export market. Being mainly a payload provider to national OEMs, some of its contracts are considered ‘national’ rather than ‘export’, their customer being national although the end-user is a foreign country. That said, the real export share of the company turnover is currently around 20%.
“Early this year we launched the ‘Aselsan Next’ transformation programme which is based on three main strategies; designing best-in-class products, investing in game changing technologies, and growing through international collaborations,” Ahmet Akyol explains to EDR On-Line. “By 2030, we aim at being among the 30 largest defence companies worldwide, we were n.47 and we are now n.42, and in six-seven years’ time we want to be among top 30. Moreover, we want to increase annual our export share, to reach 50/50 by the beginning of the next decade,” Ahmet Akyol concludes.
Photos by P. Valpolini
