Elbit and the $30 Billion Backlog
Israel’s largest defense prime by order book just crossed $30 billion in backlog — 71% of it foreign. Inside the Federmann-controlled, Nasdaq-listed company that turned European rearmament into a record order book.
Israel's largest defense prime by order book just crossed $30 billion in backlog — 71% of it foreign. Inside the Federmann-controlled, Nasdaq-listed company that turned European rearmament into a record order book.
On March 31, 2026, Elbit Systems closed its books on an order backlog of $30.2 billion — a record, up more than $7 billion in a single year, and the first time any Israeli defense company has carried more than $30 billion in committed work. About 71% of it sits outside Israel. The number is the headline. The geography is the strategy.
This is not a one-quarter story. Elbit's backlog has grown from roughly $12 billion in 2020 to $30.2 billion in Q1 2026 — a two-and-a-half-fold expansion in six years, driven almost entirely by structural change in European procurement. The book-to-bill ratio has run above 1.5x for eight consecutive quarters. Management is now capacity-constrained, not demand-constrained.
The one you can buy
Elbit is the only one of Israel's three defense primes a foreign investor can own outright. Israel Aerospace Industries is state-owned. Rafael is a government company. Elbit, founded in Haifa in 1966, trades on both the Tel Aviv and Nasdaq exchanges under the ticker ESLT, and is controlled by the Federmann family through Federmann Enterprises. It employs roughly 18,400 people and did $6.83 billion in revenue in 2024. For anyone trying to take a position in Israeli defense as an asset class, Elbit is the proxy.
That structural fact — one publicly traded Israeli prime, three sector-anchor operators — is why Elbit's share price now moves with the entire Israeli defense thesis. Institutional flows that would otherwise be spread across three tickers get concentrated into one. As IAI and Rafael partial-IPO discussions advance through 2026, that concentration will loosen — but for now, Elbit carries the flow.
The quarter
Q1 2026:
- Revenue rose almost 16% to a record $2.2 billion.
- Net profit jumped more than 50% to $161 million.
- Non-GAAP operating margin crossed 10% for the first time in years.
- Contract awards topped $4 billion — nearly double the revenue booked in the same three months.
- The board doubled the dividend to $1 a share.
By segment:
- Land systems revenue rose 27%, driven by ammunition and munitions sales in Israel and Europe. This is the PULS rocket artillery, IMI-consolidated munitions, and the Merkava upgrade franchise coming through the P&L.
- C4I and cyber rose 17% on radio and command-and-control sales into Europe. NATO interoperability is now Elbit's fastest-growing recurring-revenue category.
- ISTAR and electronic warfare rose 17%, led by airborne and ground-based high-power laser and EW systems. The Iron Beam-adjacent revenue starts to show up here.
Every segment grew. That is the shape of a demand cycle, not a mix shift.
The European book
The 71% foreign-backlog figure is the company. Elbit does not depend on the Israeli Ministry of Defense for its growth; it depends on a continent that spent thirty years disarming and is now rearming at Cold War scale.
On the morning it reported earnings, Elbit announced a single European contract worth roughly $1.4 billion — a five-year military-modernization program spanning uncrewed systems, networked land electronic warfare, precision-guided munitions, artillery, and air-to-ground capability. The individual buyer was not named. It doesn't matter much: the composition tells you it's a NATO member rebuilding a full-stack ground-force capability, and Elbit is the sole prime on the package.
The named European deals stacked into that backlog:
- Germany — PULS rocket artillery, DIRCM transport-aircraft protection, radio and C4I systems.
- Netherlands — PULS confirmed as the divisional artillery standard.
- Denmark — PULS purchase.
- Spain — SILAM (PULS variant produced with Escribano) selected as the Spanish Army's rocket artillery system, $770M+ program.
- UK — ammunition, precision-guided munitions, and land-domain electronics.
- Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Romania, Greece — various land-systems and EW packages.
PULS is now displacing HIMARS as the European standard for divisional rocket artillery. That is not a one-quarter win — it is a multi-decade franchise on the scale of Spike. Europe is now Israel's single largest defense customer, and Elbit is the company that turned that shift into an order book.
The scale context
| Prime | Q1 2026 Backlog |
|---|---|
| RTX Corporation | $220B+ |
| Lockheed Martin | $176B |
| Rheinmetall AG | €55B+ |
| Elbit Systems | $30.2B |
| Israel Aerospace Industries | ~$25B |
| Rafael Advanced Defense Systems | ~$17.7B |
The absolute gap versus Lockheed and RTX is still measured in multiples. The velocity gap is closing quarter by quarter, and Elbit is closing it in public.
The read
For the business economy, Elbit is the rare case where the public market can price Israeli defense directly. The $30.2 billion backlog is revenue visibility deep into 2028. Management is guiding to mid-teens growth and treating the constraint as capacity, not demand. The margin trajectory is upward, dividend policy is expanding, and every segment is growing at double-digit rates.
The non-market risk is reputational: Elbit is the most-targeted Israeli company for divestment and activist campaigns abroad. Public pension funds in Norway, Ireland, and parts of the UK have divested. So far, the demand from NATO defense ministries has vastly outweighed the exit pressure from Nordic pension trustees. That equation is unlikely to reverse — governments buy defense hardware in nine-figure lots; activist campaigns move basis points.
Set against the global primes, the scale gap is still wide. But the velocity gap is closing, and Elbit is the Israeli company closing it — one quarter at a time, on public markets, with a $30 billion order book that keeps growing faster than any Western reference prime.
What to watch
- The next European PULS deal. Norway and Belgium are the two names in market chatter.
- Iron Beam commercialization. Directed-energy interception at ~$2 per shot flips the cost curve of air defense — and lands in Elbit's ISTAR/EW segment.
- US procurement scaling. Elbit America is now above $2 billion in revenue and structurally hedges the FMF phase-down.
- The margin trajectory. If non-GAAP operating margin holds above 10%, Elbit's earnings multiple has room to expand.
- Federmann family succession and stake decisions. Any change in the controlling shareholder posture is a market-moving event.
