The Indian Market – Large But Crowded
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Arie Egozi
The storming of Israeli defense industries on the Indian defense market are now countering growing competition by the U.S., Russia, and other European countries.
In the unmanned aircrafts field, Israeli drones’ manufacturers’, and especially the Israeli Aerospace Industry’s (IAI) main competition are mostly American drone manufactureres.
In the Missiles field, including mostly missiles and anti-aircraft missiles, IAI has dominance with the major deal of the new and modern anti-aircraft Barak-8 missiles being signed. However, French companies are expected to try and take a bite of the cake in this field as well.
In the field of radar and alert systems, Israel has a good grip of the Indian market but here too European manufacturers are attempting to enter the market of radar systems for special missions.
In the field of old airplanes and helicopters enhancement, Russia has gotten complete control of the Indian market and has pushed aside several Israeli defence industries, IAI especially, that expected to receive a larger share of the work.
In the small arms field, Europe is putting up a strong fight in the competition.
Israeli defense industries are trying to implement their own systems to some of the main platforms India is planning to purchase from the U.S., Europe and Russia. This attempt will surely create some resistance but India knows the advantage of Israel in fields such as radar systems or Electronic Warfare systems, and it seems that in some cases, it won’t pass up the systems developed in Israel.
The Indian weapon systems market is a massive one, but after so many years of Israeli dominance over it, it is getting more and more crowded. This is mostly due to strong American and European involvement in the race.
According to a source in the Israeli security services, the case with India will repeate itself in other markets as well and calls for a changes to be made in how the Israeli security system is made up.
“It makes no sense that Israel has at least eight UAV manufacturers, that often compete over the same single contract. The whole world has seen a process of a merge between defense industries and only Israel hasn’t applied it. I think the situation will cause this to change,” the source said.
