Elbit Systems: $7.9 Billion in Revenue, $28 Billion in Backlog, and the Rocket That Beat Lockheed in Berlin

Elbit Systems closed 2025 with $7.94 billion in revenue and a $28.1 billion order backlog. That’s a 16% revenue jump year-over-year and $5.5 billion in net new backlog — the fourth straight year of double-digit growth for Israel’s largest publicly traded defense company.

Bezhalel “Butzi” Machlis has run the company since 2013. He inherited a regional supplier and turned it into a tier-one global player, listed on both NASDAQ and the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange under ESLT. Roughly 20,000 employees across five continents. Headquartered in Haifa.

The story isn’t the headline numbers. It’s where the money is coming from — and what it tells you about how the European defense market has reorganized since February 2022.

The PULS contract that changed the German artillery market

In February 2025, Germany signed a contract with Elbit for the Precise and Universal Launching System (PULS). The initial deal, structured around five launchers worth $57 million, replaced MARS-II rocket systems Berlin had shipped to Ukraine. What made it notable wasn’t the size. It was the loser.

Germany picked PULS over GMARS, the Global Mobile Artillery Rocket System co-developed by Rheinmetall and Lockheed Martin. A German prime contractor and an American defense giant, beaten on a German contract by an Israeli system delivered through a joint venture with KNDS Deutschland. The Bundeswehr is using PULS as the foundation for its Future Long-Range Indirect Fire System.

Berlin wasn’t the first. Denmark signed for eight launchers in 2023. The Netherlands signed for 20 in May 2023, in a $305 million deal. Serbia signed in 2024 for roughly $335 million. Spain is a customer. In December 2025, the Hellenic Parliament approved a budget line for PULS acquisition, with Elbit anticipating a contract “in an amount that is material to the Company.”

The reason the system has taken Europe: open architecture, single launcher chassis, multiple munition types from training rounds to the Predator Hawk with a 300-kilometer range. ACCULAR at 35 km. EXTRA at 150 km. Predator Hawk at 300. One launcher, four range bands, modular integration onto whatever truck or tracked platform the customer already runs.

Hermes UAVs and the five-segment business

Elbit splits its operating business into five segments: Aerospace, C4I and Cyber, ISTAR and Electronic Warfare, Land, and Elbit Systems of America. Aerospace — which includes the Hermes family of unmanned aerial systems and precision-guided munitions — posted 27% year-over-year revenue growth in Q4 2024 alone, driven by UAS demand in Israel and Europe.

The Hermes 900 has flown for the Israeli Air Force and a list of foreign customers that includes Brazil, Switzerland, and Germany, alongside operators Elbit does not name publicly. The Hermes 450 remains in service across more than a dozen militaries.

Land is the segment where PULS lives. It also includes tank systems, mortar systems, and the UT30 MK2 manned/unmanned turret, which won a roughly $100 million contract in April 2025 for delivery to a NATO European country via GDELS.

C4I and Cyber posted 7% Q4 growth, driven by radio systems and command-and-control. ISTAR and EW grew 8%. Elbit Systems of America, the U.S. subsidiary, saw 6% growth, anchored by the legacy Harris Night Vision business acquired in 2019 and ammunition lines for the Pentagon.

October 7 and the post-war demand curve

The Israeli Ministry of Defense placed roughly $5 billion in domestic orders with Elbit in 2024 alone. That’s exposure to a single customer at a scale most public defense companies would flag as concentration risk. Machlis has acknowledged the concentration. Investors have, for the most part, ignored it.

Reason: every other line item is going up too. European demand, post-Ukraine, has rebuilt the export book. North American demand, anchored by Elbit Systems of America, has held. Asian and Latin American contracts continue to land. The $28.1 billion backlog implies revenue visibility well into 2028.

In 2025, Elbit secured a contract from the IMOD for an Airborne High-Power Laser combat jet pod and a separate high-power laser system for helicopters — directed-energy programs that put the company in a tier of capability historically held by Lockheed, Northrop, and Rafael. R&D spend on disruptive programs, including AI enhancements, ran above $500 million in 2025.

What the stock has done

ESLT closed 2023 around $190 a share. By late 2025 it was trading well above $400. The trailing twelve-month P/E has run in the seventies — pricing in growth investors believe is structural, not cyclical. GAAP EPS came in at $11.39 for 2025, up 59% year-over-year. Non-GAAP EPS at $12.75, up 46%.

Free cash flow generation in Q4 2024 hit $320 million. The dividend has stayed modest by U.S. defense-prime standards but has held through the war.

Three risks Elbit doesn’t volunteer on earnings calls

First, the Israeli Ministry of Defense procurement cycle is enormous but politically exposed. Any government turnover that shifts defense spending priorities resets the domestic order book.

Second, U.S. export-control rules limit what Elbit can ship that contains U.S. components — a constraint that has periodically blocked deals with end users Washington disfavors. The Spike missile family, for example, has at times been re-export-restricted in ways that make European joint ventures structurally easier than direct American sales.

Third, the same battlefield validation that has driven the export book has driven political pushback. Several European parliaments have debated Israeli defense procurement on human-rights grounds. None of those debates have, so far, cancelled a signed contract. Some have delayed new ones.

Machlis runs a company that is, in market-cap terms, now larger than every NATO peer outside the U.S. primes and BAE. He took it there with a portfolio strategy — rockets, drones, sensors, lasers — that European buyers can mix and match without buying a complete platform. The PULS pattern is the template. Expect the next five years to replicate it across radar, electronic warfare, and counter-UAS.

The order book says they will.