SOUTH Africa’s defence industry recorded its most explosive export performance in at least a decade in 2025, shipping R10.1 billion ($590 million) worth of weapons, munitions and military equipment to 42 countries — nearly triple the R3.6 billion ($210 million) exported the year before. The figures, presented to Parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Defence by the National Conventional Arms Control Committee (NCACC), confirm that Africa’s only significant arms-exporting nation has planted itself firmly among the world’s top 20 arms exporters.
The surge is extraordinary in its scale and breadth. In a single calendar year, a country with the continent’s largest defence industry approved 582 export permits to destinations spanning five continents – from Tanzania’s navy to Germany’s artillery stockpile, from Iraq’s airfields to Mozambique’s conflict zone. No other African state comes close.
THE MUNITIONS MACHINE
Munitions drove the boom. Artillery rounds and shells alone accounted for R4.8 billion of the total – nearly half the entire export haul – with the lion’s share flowing from Rheinmetall Denel Munition (RDM), the Thales-linked joint venture at Somerset West that has become the engine room of South Africa’s arms economy.
The single largest transaction was a R3.3 billion order from Germany: 73,586 artillery rounds that will feed the Bundeswehr’s replenishment programme – itself a direct consequence of Berlin’s massive re-armament drive triggered by Russia’s war in Ukraine. Turkey purchased 35,000 shells valued at R676 million. Estonia took 18,540 rounds for R212 million. Australia acquired 10,272 rounds worth R279 million. France, Kenya and the UAE also featured among the munitions buyers.
A single German artillery order — R3.3 billion, 73,586 shells — accounts for nearly a third of South Africa’s entire defence export haul.
The pattern is unmistakable: European rearmament, accelerated by NATO’s response to the conflict in Ukraine, has transformed South Africa into a preferred ammunition supplier for Western militaries scrambling to replenish depleted stockpiles. Europe absorbed 42% of all South African defence exports in 2025, dwarfing every other region.
| 2025 SOUTH AFRICA ARMS EXPORTS AT A GLANCE | |
| Total export value | R10.1 billion (~$590 million) |
| Prior year (2024) | R3.6 billion (~$210 million) |
| Year-on-year increase | ≈ 181% |
| Export permits approved | 582 permits to 42 countries |
| Munitions (total) | R4.8 billion |
| Single largest order | R3.3bn — Germany (73,586 shells) |
| Dual-use goods | R600 million to 14 countries |
| Light weapons | R230 million to 17 countries |
| Naval vessels | 2 (to Tanzania — R33 million) |
| Armoured vehicles | 130+ units to multiple countries |
| Aircraft exports | Iraq, DRC, Mozambique, UAE |
FIVE REGIONS, ONE SELLER
The NCACC’s regional breakdown reveals a South African arms industry with global ambitions and global reach. Europe dominated with 42% of exports – a historic high, reflecting continent-wide NATO rearmament. The Middle East took 23%, with Turkey and the UAE the principal buyers. Africa accounted for 20%, a meaningful share that includes both platform deliveries and small arms – the kind of hardware with the longest and most contested afterlives. Asia-Pacific absorbed 12%, led by Australia. The Americas received just 3%.
EXPORT DISTRIBUTION BY REGION — 2025
| Region | Share (%) | Key Buyers |
| Europe | 42% | Germany, Turkey, Estonia, France |
| Middle East | 23% | UAE, Turkey |
| Africa | 20% | Tanzania, Kenya, DRC, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Ghana |
| Asia-Pacific | 12% | Australia |
| Americas | 3% | — |
AFRICA: VEHICLES, VESSELS AND VIGILANCE
Within Africa, the export profile shifted significantly toward platforms rather than munitions. Over 130 armoured vehicles were delivered across multiple countries, with Kenya and Ghana among the prominent recipients. Kenya’s acquisition reflects its sustained investment in domestic security infrastructure; Ghana’s order continues a pattern of procurement from Paramount Group and DCD Protected Mobility that stretches back several years.
Tanzania received two naval vessels at a cost of R33 million – a modest but strategically significant transaction that extends South Africa’s maritime defence footprint into East Africa. Aircraft were delivered to Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mozambique, the last of which is engaged in a protracted counter-insurgency campaign in its northern Cabo Delgado province, where an Islamist insurgency has claimed thousands of lives.
Zimbabwe received 9,557 light weapons valued at R35 million – the largest single light-arms order in the 2025 report. That transaction will invite scrutiny. Zimbabwe’s security forces have faced sustained allegations of politically-motivated violence and human rights abuses; the legal framework governing NCACC approvals requires that export decisions weigh human rights conditions in recipient countries.
Zimbabwe’s 9,557-unit light-arms order sits alongside a legal framework that requires the NCACC to weigh human rights conditions — raising questions about how rigorously that test was applied.
THE OVERSIGHT QUESTION
South Africa’s arms control architecture is anchored in the National Conventional Arms Control Act of 2002. The NCACC – a Cabinet-level committee of ten ministers and their deputies – is required to evaluate every export application against criteria including the human rights record of recipient states, the potential for diversion, and regional stability. End-User Certificates are the mechanism through which Pretoria seeks to bind buyers to the terms of the deal.
But the architecture has long been criticised as aspirationally robust and practically porous. A series of high-profile controversies — including a 2024 Pretoria High Court order forcing the NCACC to suspend arms exports to Myanmar, years of contested approvals to Saudi Arabia and the UAE during the Yemen war, and ongoing parliamentary concern about whether South African munitions may have reached conflict zones in Ukraine and Israel – have exposed the limits of the system’s transparency and enforcement capacity.
The NCACC’s own reporting has been dogged by inaccuracy. Its 2023 annual report erroneously listed R33.2 billion worth of exports to Australia – a figure that was actually R33 million, as clarified by the NCACC Secretariat. The committee itself has acknowledged that End-User Certificate compliance cannot be practically verified once goods leave South African ports.
Open Secrets, the South African financial crime and accountability research organisation, has argued that until South Africa seriously reforms its approach to weapons exports and urgently strengthens the NCACC to fulfil its legal mandate, any human rights stance the country takes internationally may be undermined by its own arms trade record.
INDUSTRY CONTEXT: FROM DENEL’S ASHES
The export surge arrives at a peculiar moment for South Africa’s defence industrial base. Denel, the state-owned armaments manufacturer that was the backbone of the South African defence industry for decades, has spent the better part of four years in various stages of financial crisis, restructuring and recovery. The state-owned entity’s near-collapse during the Zondo era of state capture laid waste to entire production lines and decimated the skilled workforce it took decades to build.
The 2025 boom, accordingly, is not a Denel story. It is predominantly an RDM story — and to a lesser degree, a Paramount Group and DCD Protected Mobility story. RDM, producing 155mm artillery shells at scale, is the primary beneficiary of European rearmament demand. Its majority private ownership structure has allowed it to move faster and with fewer constraints than its state-owned counterparts.
According to SIPRI’s 2026 global arms transfer data, South Africa ranks among the world’s top 20 arms exporters when measured by delivery value over the 2018–2023 period — a remarkable achievement for a country with the smallest defence budget of any nation maintaining a fully indigenous, multi-sector defence industry. Analysts at Orion Consulting have argued that with sustained government support and a ‘procure-to-export’ policy orientation, the South African defence industry could feasibly grow fivefold within a decade, potentially reaching the global top 15.
THE GEOPOLITICS OF THE BOOM
The R10.1 billion figure cannot be read in isolation from the global military spending environment. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has recorded consecutive years of record global military expenditure since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, with total global spending surpassing $2.2 trillion. The demand signal from NATO member states for artillery ammunition — specifically 155mm shells — has been among the most consequential supply-chain challenges in the conflict’s wake.
South Africa, through RDM, produces to NATO standard. That technical specification — not political alignment — is the principal reason German, Estonian and Australian defence ministries are placing orders in Somerset West rather than Brussels or Seoul. It also explains why European-origin companies such as Rheinmetall have deep equity interests in South African production capacity: they are, in effect, using South African manufacturing to fulfil European demand that their own plants cannot meet at speed.
For Pretoria, the windfall is a rare piece of unambiguously good industrial policy news. R10.1 billion in defence exports sustains thousands of skilled jobs, generates foreign exchange, and validates the case for continued investment in the South African defence industrial base. The irony — that a country which stakes its diplomatic identity on non-alignment, multilateralism and African solidarity is simultaneously arming the same NATO states it occasionally lectures about the Global South — is not lost on South Africa’s critics or, one suspects, on its diplomats.
The NCACC’s Q1 and Q2 2025 quarterly reports — the most recent available at time of publication — showed that contracting permits (forward commitments) had risen to R33 billion in just the first eight months of the then-newly appointed committee. That pipeline suggests the 2025 annual delivery figure of R10.1 billion may itself be a staging post, not a ceiling.
Parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Defence has signalled it will demand more rigorous oversight of the arms export system, including transparency about how the human rights test is applied to specific applications, the functioning of the pre-NCACC scrutiny committee, and the status of investigations into alleged unauthorised exports of intellectual property from Denel. The electronic permit management system — after years of delays — is reportedly now being rolled out nationally.
The deeper question, however, is one that no amount of digitisation will resolve: whether a country with South Africa’s constitutional values, its international reputation as a human rights champion, and its pan-Africanist foreign policy can credibly sustain a growing arms export industry — one that supplies conflict zones and human rights laggards alongside NATO partners — without a far more rigorous, transparent and accountable approval architecture than the NCACC currently provides.
R10.1 billion says the business is booming. The oversight record says the questions are multiplying at the same pace.
