No. 2

France overtakes Russia as world’s No. 2 arms exporter

According to SIPRI, France now has 11 percent of the global arms market.

BY LUCIA MACKENZIE, JOSHUA POSANER AND LAURA KAYALI

The big winners of the global weapons race are the U.S. and France while Russia saw a steep fall, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's latest analysis of arms transfers.

The European Union's arms heavyweight France significantly increased its share of the export market to 11 percent from 7.2 percent in the preceding five-year period thanks to an effort to move into regions typically dominated by Russia such as India; Moscow saw its share of global arms exports fall from 21 percent to around 11 percent — just beneath France.

“The decline in Russian arms exports started before the full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022,” said Pieter Wezeman, a senior researcher at SIPRI, tracking the decline back to 2019 while adding that sanctions related to Moscow's brutal war on Ukraine appear "to have further contributed to the increase in French arms exports."

The research compared the period from 2019 to 2023 to the 2014 to 2018 timespan. It found the global volume of international arms transfers fell by 3.3 per cent — although sales jumped sharply in Europe.

France is now in second place behind the U.S., which saw its share of global arms exports grow from 34 percent to 42 percent.

France's surge up the rankings comes thanks to major deals for Dassault Aviation's Rafale fighter jet with the likes of Qatar, Egypt and India.

“In the past few years India, Egypt and Indonesia all choose French combat aircraft in competitions that included Russian alternatives,” said Wezeman, adding that the country’s exports are “technically attractive” while “deliveries are often fast.”

India is the world's largest arms importer. Thirty-three percent of its imports come from France, while 36 percent come from Russia — the first five-year period since the 1960s that Russia or the Soviet Union don't account for more than half of the country's purchases.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the guest of honor during last year's Bastille Day celebration. The two countries pledged in January to build up defense industry ties after France sold 26 Rafale Marine fighter jets and 3 Scorpène-class military submarines to New Delhi last summer.

Most European countries are boosting defense spending; arms imports were 94 percent higher in 2019-2023 than 2014-2018. Ukraine was the Continent's largest arms importer.

The SIPRI figures also highlight Europe’s increasing reliance on the U.S., with 55 percent of arms imports coming from across the Atlantic in the last five years, compared with 35 percent in the period before that.

With more NATO countries meeting the alliance's minimum of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense, there is more money for weapons, but France isn't well placed to take advantage of that.

While it does very well in non-European markets, less than a 10th of its exports were to buyers in Europe, and more than half of that came from the sale of 17 Rafale jets to Greece.