Russia has seen its sales of arms and military equipment grow in recent years while sales from longstanding providers based in the United States and Western Europe continue to decline, according to a study released Monday by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
The study showed that in 2013 arms and military services sales came in at $402 billion, a decrease of two percent but not as much as the 2012 drop of 3.9 percent, SIPRI said. Russia’s increased presence in the market helped dampen the trend downward, SIPRI said.
However, a Russian firm has still not cracked the top 10 of companies worldwide with the most international sales, which largely consist of U.S. firms Lockheed Martin [LMT], Boeing [BA], Northrop Grumman [NOC], Raytheon [RTN] General Dynamics [GD] and United Technologies [UTX]. The Western European firms of BAE Systems, EADS, Finmeccanica and Thales are also in the top 10.
The highest ranking Russian firm, Almaz-Antey, placed 12th, followed by United Aircraft Corporation at 15 and United Shipbuilding Corporation at 17.
Russia’s Tactical Missiles Corporation more than doubled its sales, climbing from 74 on the list in 2012 to 46 in 2013.
The SIPRI said sales by Russian-based companies increased by 20 percent in 2013, attributing the growth to continued increased government investments in military modernization.
“The remarkable increases in Russian companies’ arms sales in both 2012 and 2013 are in large part due to uninterrupted investments in military procurement by the Russian government during the 2000s,” said Siemon Wezeman, a senior researcher at SIPRI.
“These investments are explicitly intended to modernize national production capabilities and weapons in order to bring them on par with major U.S. and Western European arms producers’ capabilities and technologies,” he said.