MKE - Makina ve Kimya Endustrisi A.S.

MKE is the Turkish state arsenal, and it carries the institutional memory of the Ottoman Tophane-i Amire foundry that supplied the empire's guns. The modern company dates from 15 March 1950, when Ankara gathered scattered military factories into one state economic enterprise. It stayed in that legal form for seventy-one years. Law 7330, passed on 3 July 2021, converted MKE into a joint stock company wholly owned by the Ministry of National Defence, a change meant to let it invest, price and export the way a commercial manufacturer does rather than the way a ministry department does. Around 3,982 people worked for the company in 2024 across roughly a dozen plants concentrated in Kirikkale, Ankara and Cankiri, plus a metals recycling operation at Izmit. Reported revenue that year was near 1.14 billion dollars.

The company sorts its own catalogue into five areas: weapons, ammunition, explosives and pyrotechnics, materials and equipment, and system solutions. Weapons covers the full infantry ladder. The MPT series of 7.62 mm and 5.56 mm national infantry rifles is the volume item, built in tens of thousands for the Turkish Armed Forces, and it sits alongside the JNG-90 bolt action sniper rifle marketed for export as the Bora, submachine guns, 12.7 mm heavy machine guns with quick change barrels, and 40 mm automatic grenade launchers. Artillery is the other pole. MKE builds the Boran, a 105 mm air transportable light towed howitzer that has been exported to Albania, and the Yavuz, a 155 mm 52 calibre gun mounted on a 6x6 truck chassis that the company launched as a project in 2016 and now sells as a finished vehicle. Large calibre gun barrels and tank main armament round out that end of the line.

Ammunition is the volume business and the reason the company matters to allied stockpiles. Production spans small calibre rounds from 5.56 mm up to 20 mm, medium calibre 25 mm anti-aircraft natures, 155 mm artillery projectiles and the propellant charges that go with them, 60 mm and 81 mm mortar bombs, hand grenades and fuzes. The explosives and pyrotechnics side makes the inputs rather than the end items, covering blasting detonators, primers, rocket fuze igniters, countermeasure cartridges and bulk propellant, which is why six of the eleven factories make raw materials instead of finished systems. Materials and equipment stretches into steel and brass semi-finished goods and into recycled cartridge case metal, and the MKE Maksam subsidiary, a plant founded in 1920, turns out CBRN protective masks and medical and protective equipment. System solutions is the newest strand, pulling the guns and rounds together into counter drone packages and integrated effectors as Turkish demand shifted toward cheap air threats. MKE says it now makes more than 470 distinct defence products and ships to more than 100 countries, and it has set up ammunition production lines in eight countries under technology transfer deals, selling the capability to make rounds as well as the rounds themselves.