ROKETSAN: “We have more than 40 new products that we have not announced to the public”
ROKETSAN General Manager İkinci said, “There are currently more than 40 new product R&D activities that we have not publicized in any way. These also have production facilities. These production facilities are being realized one by one.”
Murat İkinci, General Manager of ROKETSAN, was the guest of Anadolu Agency (AA) Technology Desk.
Stating that ROKETSAN has over 5,000 employees, İkinci said that 2,000 of them are involved in R&D activities.
İkinci underlined that ROKETSAN is an institution that realizes all its needs in terms of R&D with its own personnel, and emphasized that it has a human resource that can compete with the world with its level of knowledge and experience in technology.
“More than 1,500 enterprises work with ROKETSAN as a business partnership”
Pointing out that there is an ecosystem acting together with ROKETSAN, İkinci said: “We have a supply chain that contributes to our production. More than 1,500 small and medium-sized enterprises operating in Turkey work with ROKETSAN in a business partnership logic. We say to them, ‘these are our targets, we need to produce these, we need to produce this much, or we need these technologies’. We develop those technologies together, nationalize them, and then export them, creating a lifeline for both Turkey and these companies.”
Stating that ROKETSAN has faced very serious sanctions in the last 15-20 years, İkinci said that they overcame the sanctions by using this ecosystem.
Stating that together with the companies within the ecosystem, they have localized almost all of the products that Turkey is dependent on foreign sources, İkinci said, “If we are talking about a localization rate of over 90 percent in the products produced by ROKETSAN, this is actually a result of the embargoes imposed on us. This is also a success of our ecosystem, which acts together without giving up in the face of obstacles and develops more successful domestic and national subsystems.”
ROKETSAN contributes to the striking power of the Steel Dome
Speaking about the Steel Dome project, İkinci said, “Currently, there are many air defence systems that we have developed indigenously and nationally. In the Steel Dome, ROKETSAN’s task is to produce the air defence missiles that constitute the striking power of the system, the weapon systems that shoot the air defence system missiles, and their production.”
Referring to the layered structure of the Steel Dome, İkinci said, “We are talking about smart systems that overlap and protect each other and are activated at various stages and phases. Our lowest air defense system that is already in the field is the ALKA high-energy laser weapon. SUNGUR is our portable air defense missile. Together with it, we have the HİSAR A low-altitude air defense system at the next level. At medium altitude, we have the HİSAR O and HİSAR O RF systems, and above that, we have the SİPER system, which actually covers them all. These are the air defense systems contributed by ROKETSAN.”
Emphasizing that the Steel Dome is not a project that will end as threats are constantly evolving, İkinci said that the system will constantly improve its capabilities according to new threats.
“Their embargoes are meaningless”
Second, noting that the countries that previously imposed sanctions on Turkey have recently changed their stance, he said, “In fact, the expectation of the countries that imposed sanctions was that Turkey would give up in the face of these sanctions and accept their conditions. However, they could not achieve the result they expected. The will of our President and the National Technology Move prevented these countries from reaching the result they expected. At the point we have reached now, there is a Turkish defense industry that can implement better systems than the systems that were not given to us.The embargoes they imposed no longer have any meaning.”
“ROKETSAN developed the technology that makes UAVs armed”
Stressing that Turkey is currently by far the best in the world in terms of UCAV technologies and UCAV ammunition, İkinci underlined that they want to expand the markets to which Turkey’s defence industry exports.Stating that ROKETSAN developed the technology that makes UAVs armed, İkinci said, “This adventure actually started with MAM-L and MAM-C. In other words, when the first TB-2 and ANKA projects were launched, ROKETSAN took the initiative regarding the munitions to be used by these platforms.With its own R&D activities, ROKETSAN started to develop weapons for arming these UAVs with its own budget and its own studies. These activities have been very successful. With the success of both our UCAVs and our ammunition, the market has grown very rapidly.”
Stating that the munitions fired by UCAVs have now become technologies that can penetrate the armor of main battle tanks on the battlefield, neutralize air defence systems, and hit special areas and command centres inside enemy lines, İkinci said, “This adventure, which started with MAM-C and MAM-L, has become a situation where UCAVs have an impact area of up to 150 kilometres.”
“There are more than 40 new product R&D activities that we have not publicized in any way”
Stating that ROKETSAN directs the income from its export activities towards increasing its production capacity and R&D activities, İkinci said, “There are currently more than 40 new product R&D activities that we have not publicized in any way.These also have production facilities.These production facilities are being realized one by one.”
Stating that ROKETSAN has realized an investment of nearly 500 million dollars in the last three years to increase its production capacity, İkinci said:
“There is a great export potential in the world. The most important factor to reach this potential is to rapidly increase your production capability. In this sense, our investments in the coming period, which will increase our production capacity several times over, are continuing. ROKETSAN is one of the fastest growing companies in this sense.We rank 71st among the world’s largest defense companies, but we are one of the fastest growing defense companies in the world, and one of the fastest growing defense companies in Turkey.In Turkey, Baykar is the first and ROKETSAN is the second.”
Stating that they cooperate with friendly and brotherly countries, İkinci said, “We are realizing an infrastructure in Azerbaijan that will produce some of ROKETSAN’s rocket and missile technologies.Currently, there are similar requests from many countries regarding the realization of joint production.”Stating that Turkey has now started to offer similar programs to other countries as partnership programs, which Turkey was a partner in the past, İkinci emphasized that this situation has made Turkey a focus in terms of defence technologies.
– “ROKETSAN will very quickly become one of the world’s top 50 defense companies”
Pointing out that 2024 was a very successful year for ROKETSAN, Mr. İkinci said, “We see that we achieved the targets we would normally achieve in the middle of 2025 at the close of 2024. We are revising our strategic plan to raise these targets even higher. ROKETSAN will very quickly become one of the 50 largest defense companies in the world.”
Stating that they spent a budget of more than 7 billion TL in 2024 only on R&D activities, İkinci said, “ROKETSAN is one of Turkey’s largest R&D organizations. More than 2 thousand engineers and technicians are making efforts to develop local and national technologies in R&D activities.”
Pointing out that the engines of the missiles they have developed are all domestic, İkinci concluded his words as follows:
“We have not been able to buy anything that is not domestic for a very long time. We had a foreign dependency, especially in the engines of our cruise missiles, and we ended this dependency as a result of the activities we carried out with Kale Arge. Now, the engines of the entire family of our cruise missiles are produced locally and indigenously. Ballistic missiles and anti-tank missiles use solid fuel engines. These are engines that ROKETSAN has been developing indigenously for a very long time. There are also electric motors that we use as power elements. These are also produced by many companies working with us within the scope of our docking activities.”
Source: M5
