Leonardo S.p.A.

Leonardo traces its corporate lineage to Finmeccanica, formed in 1948 as an Italian state holding company that gradually absorbed the country's aerospace and electronics manufacturers, from Alenia to Agusta to OTO Melara. It renamed itself Leonardo in 2016 and trades on Milan's Borsa Italiana under the ticker LDO, with the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance holding just under a third of shares as its largest shareholder. Helicopters is Leonardo's most globally visible business, built around the former AgustaWestland brand. The AW139 is one of the best-selling medium twin helicopters in the world, in service with militaries, coast guards, and commercial operators well past a thousand units delivered, alongside larger variants like the AW189 and the AW101 Merlin used by several European navies and air forces for utility and anti-submarine roles.

Aeronautics covers fixed-wing aircraft, most prominently Leonardo's roughly one-third share of the Eurofighter Typhoon consortium alongside BAE Systems and Airbus, the C-27J Spartan tactical transport, and the M-346 advanced jet trainer, which doubles as a light attack aircraft and has sold to air forces from Italy to Singapore to Poland. Leonardo also holds a stake in ATR, the regional turboprop maker it runs jointly with Airbus, and has been developing the Falco family of unmanned aircraft. Electronics is where Leonardo's scope gets harder to summarize in a sentence, spanning radar, sonar, electro-optics, avionics, naval combat systems, and land-based defense electronics, largely inherited from Selex and the former British firm Marconi Electronic Systems that Finmeccanica acquired in the 2000s. This electronics base also underpins Leonardo's majority-owned US subsidiary, Leonardo DRS, a separately listed defense electronics company supplying sensors, network computing, and power systems to the Pentagon.

Cyber & Security covers secure communications, digital platforms, and cybersecurity services for government and critical infrastructure customers, while the Space division, run largely through joint ventures Telespazio, majority owned by Leonardo, and Thales Alenia Space, where Leonardo is the minority partner, builds and operates satellites and ground systems spanning Earth observation, navigation, and telecommunications. Land systems is Leonardo's newest and most disruptive addition. Its roughly 1.7 billion euro acquisition of Iveco Defence Vehicles, agreed in 2025, brought armored vehicle production, including the Ariete main battle tank upgrade program, the Freccia and Centauro wheeled combat vehicles, and Iveco's broader military truck lineup, directly into the group for the first time, filling a gap Leonardo previously covered only through minority stakes and partnerships like MBDA, the pan-European missile maker it jointly owns with BAE Systems and Airbus. With about 60,500 employees and revenue near 17 billion euros, Leonardo is Italy's largest defense company and one of a handful of firms in Europe with a genuinely full-spectrum portfolio across air, land, sea, space, and cyber.