ROKETSAN Subsidiaries and Affiliates: Ownership Explained

ROKETSAN has no publicly declared portfolio of subsidiaries. The company is itself an affiliate of the Turkish Armed Forces Foundation (TSKGV), which holds 55 percent of its shares. Its one known direct equity stake is in TeknoHAB, and the fuze manufacturer Tapasan merged into ROKETSAN in June 2012. Everything else, from ASELSAN to EUROSAM and overseas production, is contractual partnership rather than shared capital.

Does ROKETSAN have subsidiaries?

ROKETSAN is not built as a holding company. Where some defence groups spread their activity across a chain of controlled entities, ROKETSAN develops and manufactures its product families largely inside its own plants and under a single legal personality. Its growth has come from enlarging the campuses it already operates at Elmadag, Lalahan and Kirikkale, and from deepening its supplier base, rather than from founding new companies.

That makes the short answer to the subsidiaries question a three-part one:

• Direct equity stake: ROKETSAN became a shareholder in the TeknoHAB technology development zone management company in 2021. This is the one capital participation the company is publicly known to hold.
• Company absorbed: Tapasan A.S., the fuze manufacturer, merged into ROKETSAN in June 2012 and ceased to exist as a separate legal entity. It is not a subsidiary but part of the parent company.
• Structures that are not equity holdings: the ASELSAN cooperation, the EUROSAM agreement, the joint work with TUBITAK SAGE, the planned overseas production plants and the strategic supplier programme are all contractual arrangements. None of them involves ROKETSAN owning shares in another company.

Because ROKETSAN is not listed on a stock exchange, it does not publish the periodic annual reports through which a listed manufacturer would disclose a consolidated group structure. The picture below is therefore assembled from official corporate announcements rather than from filings.

Whose affiliate is ROKETSAN? Inside the TSKGV structure

The most accurate description of ROKETSAN’s own position is that it is a foundation affiliate rather than a parent company. Fifty-five percent of its capital belongs to the Turkish Armed Forces Foundation (TSKGV), a body established to build national defence industrial capability. The remaining shares are divided between ASELSAN, MKE and VakifBank, with a small residual block held by other shareholders.

Two consequences follow. First, ROKETSAN sits under foundation control rather than under a commercial parent, which shapes how its investment decisions and long-term programmes are approved. Second, its shares are not traded on Borsa Istanbul, so there is no market-facing disclosure regime forcing publication of a subsidiary register.

A further feature of the structure is that two of the shareholders are also industrial counterparts. ASELSAN is simultaneously a 15 percent owner of ROKETSAN and one of its most frequent programme partners in electronics, seekers and guidance subsystems. MKE, holding another 15 percent, operates in ammunition and propellant, adjacent to ROKETSAN’s own work. Ownership and supply relationships overlap in ways that a simple shareholding table does not fully capture.

The table below separates ROKETSAN’s capital participation from its contract-based cooperation, because the two are routinely confused in press coverage. Only the first entry is an equity stake in the accounting sense, and the second is a completed merger rather than a holding. Everything from the third row down is a programme, consortium or supply relationship in which no shares change hands.

Tapasan A.S.: the company absorbed into ROKETSAN

Tapasan A.S. was established by TSKGV to meet the fuze requirement of the Turkish Armed Forces. As of June 2012 it merged with ROKETSAN and stopped operating as a separate legal entity. This is the single most common source of confusion in searches for ROKETSAN subsidiaries: Tapasan was not acquired and retained as a daughter company, it was absorbed, and the corporate name no longer exists.

After the merger, fuze design, qualification, production and delivery moved under the ROKETSAN roof and are carried out in a dedicated fuze technology centre. The fuze is one of the critical subsystems of artillery ammunition as much as of rockets and missiles, because it governs when and how a warhead functions. Bringing that work in-house meant ROKETSAN could design the full firing chain rather than only the airframe and motor.

The resulting product family is broad. It spans adjustable, delay and precision mechanical rocket fuzes for 107 mm and 122 mm systems, electromechanical proximity fuzes for 122 mm and 300 mm rockets, anti-submarine warfare fuzes, fuzes for helicopter-launched missiles, and fuzes for medium and long-range anti-tank missiles.

TeknoHAB: ROKETSAN’s one direct equity stake

The structure in which ROKETSAN has actually placed capital is TeknoHAB Teknoloji Gelistirme Bolgesi Yonetici A.S., the management company of an Ankara technology development zone focused on aerospace. At an extraordinary general assembly held on 9 July 2021, the company raised its capital and admitted ROKETSAN as a new shareholder. The accompanying amendments to the articles of association were approved by the Ministry of Industry and Technology and the Ministry of Trade.

The shareholder list of the management company reads as a roll call of the Turkish defence and aerospace sector: SSTEK, ASELSAN, TUSAS, HAVELSAN, ROKETSAN, the HAB organised industrial zone and Gazi University. The individual stakes held by each partner have not been officially disclosed, so no percentage can responsibly be attributed to ROKETSAN.

For ROKETSAN the stake serves two practical purposes. It puts the company in direct contact with the small and medium-sized technology firms operating inside the zone, and it wires university and industry research into its own supply chain at an early stage. It is an infrastructure and ecosystem investment rather than a production asset.

Sister companies under the TSKGV umbrella

ASELSAN, TUSAS, HAVELSAN, ASPILSAN and ISBIR are frequently listed alongside ROKETSAN, and are sometimes described as its affiliates. They are not. The correct term is sister company: in each of them the controlling interest is held by TSKGV, and the foundation’s stake varies from company to company. ROKETSAN holds no shares in any of them.

The one relationship that runs in both directions is with ASELSAN, which is a sister company under the same foundation and, at the same time, a direct 15 percent shareholder in ROKETSAN. Ownership flows from ASELSAN to ROKETSAN, not the other way round.

In practice the umbrella structure functions as a division of labour across Turkish defence programmes. ASELSAN concentrates on guidance electronics, seekers, radar and fire control; TUSAS on air platforms; HAVELSAN on software, simulation and command and control; ROKETSAN on missiles, rockets and munitions. Because a single foundation stands behind all of them, assembling a multi-company industrial team for a national programme requires coordination rather than merger or acquisition.

ASELSAN and ROKETSAN: strategic cooperation since 2008

The two companies signed a Strategic Cooperation Agreement on 12 March 2008. The agreement covers collaboration on the development and production of missile and rocket systems in both domestic and export programmes, and it remains the reference document for how the two firms divide work.

Critically, no joint company was established. The cooperation is run through project-based allocation of responsibility rather than through a shared legal entity with its own balance sheet. On a typical air defence, anti-tank or naval programme, ROKETSAN takes the missile and the munition while ASELSAN supplies the radar, the electro-optical sensors and the fire control elements.

This is why the ASELSAN relationship appears twice in any honest account of ROKETSAN’s corporate structure: once as a shareholding, where ASELSAN owns part of ROKETSAN, and once as a contract, where the two work side by side on programmes. Neither of those makes ASELSAN a ROKETSAN subsidiary or a ROKETSAN affiliate.

EUROSAM and international consortia

ROKETSAN’s most visible international arrangement is the one built around EUROSAM, the joint venture of European missile houses MBDA and Thales. On 14 July 2017 in Ankara, executives of EUROSAM, ASELSAN and ROKETSAN, named as Michel Vigneras, Faik Eken and Selcuk Yasar, signed a Heads of Agreement under the supervision of what was then the Undersecretariat for Defence Industries. The document set out the work-share for a definition study covering a long-range air and missile defence system.

The process continued on 8 November 2017, when the defence ministers of France, Italy and Turkey signed a letter of intent, followed by a definition contract expected to run for eighteen months.

Two points matter for anyone researching ROKETSAN’s group structure. First, EUROSAM itself is a company owned by MBDA and Thales, not by the Turkish participants. Second, the arrangement is industrial cooperation established by contract, so it creates no shareholding for ROKETSAN and no consolidated entity. It belongs in the partnership column, not in an affiliates list.

Overseas co-production: Azerbaijan, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia

ROKETSAN’s recent export strategy has moved beyond selling finished rounds towards establishing production in customer countries. In February 2025, General Manager Murat Ikinci announced that production facilities would be established in Azerbaijan, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia. Technology transfer is the headline element on the Indonesian side, while the Saudi arrangement is framed around joint production.

What has not been stated is the corporate form. Whether these plants will be wholly owned subsidiaries, joint ventures with local partners, or licensed production under agreement, and what any shareholding split would be, has not been officially disclosed. No registration documents, capital figures or ownership percentages have been published.

Until such details are announced, these facilities should be classified as an overseas co-production model rather than as declared foreign subsidiaries of ROKETSAN. Anyone compiling a corporate group chart today has nothing official to place in the box. If the legal structures are formally announced, that is the point at which ROKETSAN’s affiliate map would genuinely change.

Strategic Supplier Management Programme: an 88-firm ecosystem

For understanding how ROKETSAN actually organises its industrial base, the supplier network tells more than any affiliates list. The company runs a Strategic Supplier Management Programme intended to build long-term relationships at strategic, tactical and operational levels, effectively substituting durable contracts for equity control.

The second Strategic Business Partners Summit was held in Ankara on 24 February 2025 under the slogan Rising for Tomorrow, drawing more than 250 suppliers from the ecosystem. At the event, 63 firms received partnership certificates at various levels, taking the total number of companies in the programme to 88, and 25 firms received a Stakeholder Seniority Award. The first summit, on 21 September 2023, had designated 45 firms as strategic business partners.

Financial disclosures at the 2025 summit gave rare visibility into the company’s scale. General Manager Murat Ikinci stated that ROKETSAN closed 2024 with 1.28 billion dollars in revenue, of which 380 million dollars came from exports, and put the 2025 expectation at 1.8 billion dollars against a target of at least 25 percent annual growth. Chairman Prof. Dr. Faruk Yigit emphasised that full independence would be reached together with the supplier base, and the head of the Presidency of Defence Industries, Prof. Dr. Haluk Gorgun, also addressed the summit. At the 2023 edition, Yigit had set a target of lifting exports above 50 percent of total turnover, while Ikinci pointed to entering the world’s top 50 defence companies.

For reference, the Defense News Top 100 list published in 2025, using 2024 data, ranked ROKETSAN 71st with roughly 1.55 billion dollars in defence revenue. The gap with the company’s own 1.28 billion dollar figure reflects a different counting methodology rather than a contradiction. ROKETSAN management has since stated that 2025 closed above 2 billion dollars, with new contracts bringing total order volume to around 10 billion dollars.

Subsidiary, affiliate or partnership: the difference

Three terms are used interchangeably in general coverage, and separating them resolves most of the confusion around ROKETSAN:

• Subsidiary: a legal entity that the parent controls and consolidates into its accounts. ROKETSAN has no publicly declared subsidiary.
• Affiliate: a company in which a shareholding is held without control. The known example for ROKETSAN is the TeknoHAB management company. ROKETSAN is itself an affiliate of TSKGV in exactly this sense.
• Partnership: a joint project run by contract with no equity relationship at all. The ASELSAN cooperation, the EUROSAM agreement, the TUBITAK SAGE fuze work and the supplier programme all fall here.

The model ROKETSAN has chosen concentrates capital under one roof instead of distributing it across new companies. Investment in the Elmadag, Lalahan and Kirikkale campuses is the concrete expression of that choice: capacity has been added by enlarging the facilities of the existing legal entity, supported by a workforce of roughly 5,000 people including some 2,000 in research and development. Anyone searching for a ROKETSAN group chart with a dozen boxes beneath the parent will not find one, because the company has deliberately not been built that way.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many subsidiaries does ROKETSAN have?

ROKETSAN has no publicly declared portfolio of subsidiaries. The one structure in which it is known to hold a direct equity stake is the TeknoHAB technology development zone management company, which it joined in 2021. Tapasan A.S. is not a separate subsidiary either; the fuze manufacturer merged into ROKETSAN in June 2012 and no longer exists as a distinct legal entity.

Whose affiliate is ROKETSAN?

ROKETSAN is an affiliate of the Turkish Armed Forces Foundation, known by its Turkish acronym TSKGV, which holds 55 percent of the company’s capital. The remaining shares are distributed among ASELSAN with 15 percent, MKE with 15 percent, VakifBank with 10 percent and other shareholders with 5 percent. The company is not traded on Borsa Istanbul.

Is there a partnership between ROKETSAN and ASELSAN?

Yes, and it runs in two directions. ASELSAN is a direct shareholder holding 15 percent of ROKETSAN, and the two companies also work together under a Strategic Cooperation Agreement signed on 12 March 2008 covering missile and rocket systems in domestic and export programmes. No joint company was established; the work is divided project by project.

Is Tapasan A.S. still operating?

No. Tapasan A.S., established by TSKGV to supply fuzes to the Turkish Armed Forces, merged with ROKETSAN as of June 2012 and ceased to exist as a separate legal entity. Fuze design, qualification, production and delivery are today carried out under the ROKETSAN roof at a dedicated fuze technology centre rather than by a subsidiary.

Does ROKETSAN have companies abroad?

ROKETSAN announced in February 2025 that production facilities would be established in Azerbaijan, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia, with technology transfer emphasised for Indonesia and joint production for Saudi Arabia. Whether these will take the form of subsidiaries, joint ventures or licensed production, and what any shareholding split would be, has not been officially disclosed.

How many suppliers does ROKETSAN work with?

The number of firms in the Strategic Supplier Management Programme reached 88 as of 24 February 2025. At the second Strategic Business Partners Summit held in Ankara on that date, 63 firms received partnership certificates at various levels and 25 received a Stakeholder Seniority Award, with more than 250 suppliers from the ecosystem attending the event.

Sources

• ROKETSAN, Roketsan Continues to Grow Together With Its Business Partners, second Strategic Business Partners Summit, 24 February 2025: roketsan.com.tr
• ROKETSAN, Moving Confidently Into the Future With Our Strategic Partners, first Strategic Business Partners Summit, 21 September 2023: roketsan.com.tr
• ROKETSAN, Fuze Systems product family and the Tapasan merger: roketsan.com.tr
• TeknoHAB, ROKETSAN A.S. Becomes a Shareholder in TeknoHAB, general assembly decision of 9 July 2021: teknohab.com.tr
• Turkish Armed Forces Foundation (TSKGV), Shareholdings page: tskgv.org.tr
• MBDA, EUROSAM Together With ASELSAN and ROKETSAN Lay the Foundation of Strategic Cooperation in Air and Missile Defence, 14 July 2017: mbda-systems.com

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