The 2023 report on French defence exports confirms a ten-year rule: apart from Dassault Aviation’s Rafale fighter jet, there are no good annual results. Orders received amounted to 8.2 billion euros, according to the annual report of the Ministry of the Armed Forces to Parliament for 2024, published by the news site Midpart. This is a sharp decline compared to 2022 (26.9 billion), a year marked by the order of 80 Rafale (16.9 billion) by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), but also compared to 2021 (11.7 billion).
The entourage of Sébastien Lecornu, the resigning Minister of the Armed Forces, announced on Wednesday, September 4, that the document will be made public. “outside the current trading periods”. In his introduction, he points out that after an exceptional year due to the contract with the United Arab Emirates, 2023 is “more balanced”. This decline comes as military spending worldwide recorded its biggest increase in a decade in 2023. Ongoing conflicts, including in Ukraine, and rising tensions (Middle East, Taiwan, etc.) have pushed them up to $2.443 billion (€2.200 billion), or +6.8% in real terms, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
In 2023, Indonesia placed an order for 18 Rafale (for 2.6 billion euros) and signed several contracts worth more than 200 million: Caesar guns from KNDS-Nexter for Lithuania, three corvettes from the Normandy company CMN for Angola, four Patroller tactical drones and their ground control centre manufactured by Safran for Greece. In descending order, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, India, Angola and Ukraine have been the largest customers of the French defence industrial and technological base.
Export dynamics
The government expects a much better balance for 2024, inflated by several major contracts: the Rafale, with the 12 aircraft for Serbia, announced during Emmanuel Macron’s trip to Belgrade, and the 18 units in the Navy version destined for Serbia, India, whose confirmation is expected at the end of the year; and the four Barracuda-class submarines that Naval Group will build in Cherbourg (La Manche) for the Netherlands, if the contract is finally signed in the coming months.
Rather, we should look at the dynamics of exports, the Ministry of the Armed Forces believes. “If 2023 may appear relatively modest in terms of orders received, this does not correspond to an underlying trendspecifies the report. The evolution of our exports must be assessed on longer time scales because the annual balance is very fluctuating, depending on the number and amount of the major contracts that come into force during the year. » This is particularly the case with the Rafale, whose export did not begin until 2015, eleven years after its naval version entered service.
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