In today’s highly volatile environment, our strength lies in our long-term vision and the loyalty of our customers. We owe our longevity to our ability to envision the future and adapt to new challenges. We play a key role in safeguarding national sovereignty, a vital precondition of long-term sustainability.
We sustain French national sovereignty by providing the military with the aircraft and operational support it needs; by ensuring the preservation of France’s strategic expertise in the design and operational management of high-performance air combat systems; and by strengthening the French defense industry through our export sales to strategic customers.
Fighter aircraft and their operational support systems constitute the cornerstones of security and deterrence in the face of major threats.
Dassault Aviation manufactures conventional combat systems. The manufacturing and export of military hardware is subject to a stringent set of regulatory controls overseen by the French government.
Our dual expertise means that we can count on markets with different business cycles, thus reducing our exposure to fluctuating economic conditions. We design and manufacture our combat jets and civil aircraft in the same design office and the same plants. The state-of-the-art technology developed for military use also benefits our civil aviation business, which in turn generates innovations in terms of production and certification.
Dassault Aviation is the only aerospace group in the world that is still owned by the family of its founder, Marcel Dassault. This unwavering backing from our main shareholder ensures the stability and continuity of our strategy: Éric Trappier is only the fifth CEO in a century. This enables us to take a long-term view, which is a major asset in aviation where cycles stretch over decades: a typical combat aircraft stays in production for more than 25 years and remains in service for upwards of 40 years.
This stability allows us to uphold the values that underpin our strength as a company: commitment, teamwork, a passion for aviation, rigorous standards, innovation and determination.
Dassault Aviation takes a unique approach to sharing profits with its employees in France, based on fair distribution: 35% of the 2025 net income of our French businesses is thus distributed under specific profit-sharing and incentive agreements. Our shareholders were offered 35% of our adjusted net income as dividends at the Annual General Meeting held on May 13, 2026. Dassault Aviation pays the bulk of its taxes in France: 89% in 2025.
As an industrial architect and systems integrator, Dassault Aviation has extensive expertise in the use of cutting-edge technologies and data. This rare ability makes us a pivotal player when it comes to aerospace research and development in France and Europe, in both civil and military aviation.
Our commitment to innovation is evidenced by our spending on R&D, which amounted to over a billion euros in 2025. We are working on the ongoing development of the Rafale F4, Export and F5 standards, a combat drone system, a future combat aircraft, as well as the Falcon 10X, Archange and Albatros, along with the Vortex space plane.
Our Vortex roadmap for the development of a range of space planes is designed to strengthen key European sovereign capabilities and meet the challenges of the new space economy.
This phased, dual-purpose roadmap is geared towards developing key strategic capabilities, including transport to and from orbit, as well as civil and military missions conducted from an autonomous orbital platform.
Backed by the French Ministry of the Armed Forces and the European Space Agency (ESA), the Vortex program is part of an ongoing process of European and international cooperation.
We are developing AI systems to boost performance and safety, while ensuring that people remain in charge of the decision-making process. Our approach consists of deploying the right AI solutions in the right place for the benefit of our crews, our customers and our manufacturing operations.
Business aviation has the potential to be at the forefront of efforts to reduce carbon emissions in the aerospace industry.
Our Falcon 8X is the first business jet in the world to have earned CO2 certification from the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). It is compliant with the International Civil Aviation Organization’s (ICAO) international decarbonization regulations. EASA is the first major regulatory authority to have adopted this standard, with a view to decarbonizing civil aviation and promoting the technological innovations necessary to bringing this about.
Following this achievement, Dassault is moving ahead with certification for the Falcon 6X and 2000LXS. The Falcon 10X will be natively compliant with international energy efficiency standards.
As part of France’s civil aviation research council (Corac), we are actively involved in a series of technology maturation projects aimed at shaping the future of aviation.
Since 2008, the Clean Sky 1 and 2 programs have enabled us to collaborate with some 20 major partners in seven European countries. We are continuing with our efforts in this area by heading up the Clean Aviation program’s Concerto project.
We provide the project management and organizational expertise needed to ensure that all parties involved work together effectively in order to deliver complex programs that meet our customers’ evolving needs, on time and on budget.
We manage the entire life cycle of aircraft programs for our customers and partners. We add value through our ability to manage, coordinate and guarantee the ultimate efficacy of the systems delivered by the projects we lead, whether they be national or international in scope.
Guarantor of each system’s underlying fundamentals and its development, we are responsible for assessing the technological challenges involved, as well as the scope and sharing of tasks between partners.
Our comprehensive, dual civil-military approach to product design is focused on mastering complexity and harnessing data.
AI is set to boost the operational effectiveness of aviation and will underpin collaborative military combat in the future.
Our strategy involves the incorporation of secure, sovereign and supervised AI into combat systems. To this end, we entered into a partnership with the French Ministry of Defense’s AI Agency (AMIAD), in June 2025, and with Thales, as part of the cortAIx AI accelerator initiative, in November 2025.
A partnership with Harmattan AI was also announced in January 2026. Its objective is to speed up the process of integrating supervised autonomy and AI into aviation systems.
The Rafale continues to surge ahead thanks to its built-in ability to integrate technological advances and user feedback. The F4 standard, with its focus on connectivity and enhanced payloads, is currently being finalized. Preliminary development work on the F5 standard has commenced.
The F5 standard will be focused on collaborative combat. It will be capable of operating with a combat drone system. Drawing on the achievements of the nEUROn program and our ongoing work in the area of autonomous technologies, this highly versatile stealth system will be designed to keep pace with future threats.
Deployed as part of combat bubbles, our future weapons systems need to enable humans to maintain their position at the helm of the decision-making process, while ensuring operational performance in the midst of high-intensity operations and in situations involving contested network conditions. This will be achieved by means of collaborative combat, automated systems based partly on AI, as well as adaptive and resilient system architectures.
Following its rollout on March 10, 2026, in Mérignac, the Falcon 10X is continuing its development process with its maiden flight and test campaign.
The Falcon 2000LXS Albatros made its maiden flight in January 2025. On top of the 7 maritime surveillance and response aircraft (AVSIMAR) ordered in December 2020, the French defense procurement agency (DGA) exercised an option for 5 additional aircraft in September 2025.
The Falcon 8X Archange made its maiden flight in July 2025. This aircraft, 3 of which have been ordered by the French government, is intended for strategic intelligence purposes.
Our expertise as a system architect draws on cutting-edge digital technologies, ranging from 3D creation to artificial intelligence. For over forty years, we have been among the pioneers in this industrial revolution, working to ensure digital continuity across all our products.
Ever since the advent of 3D modeling, we have been investing in digital innovations. Our longstanding relationship with Dassault Systèmes, our sister company, has given us access to the most advanced expertise. This close working relationship with the world leader in Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) allows for agile incorporation of digital technologies into our manufacturing operations. These new tools improve our predictive capabilities and ensure digital continuity from design all the way through manufacturing and support, and right down to the user experience.
Our Falcon and future combat systems are all developed using Dassault Systèmes’ state-of-the-art 3DExperience platform, which has replaced the PLM solutions used previously in our civil and military programs.
We use the 3DExperience platform, hosted on Dassault Systèmes’ sovereign cloud, as part of our French armed forces aircraft maintenance programs. It has opened the way to the first collaborative engineering solution that complies with national defense cybersecurity regulations. This represents a significant step towards the creation of a sovereign European cloud.
Bleu, a French company owned jointly by Capgemini and Orange, was selected in December 2025 to enable us to benefit from the solutions offered by Microsoft Azure and Office 365 in a secure environment protected by European laws.
Our digital modeling capabilities allow us to coordinate the development of complex airborne systems across all our programs. As a result, Dassault’s collaborative system engineering solutions enable multiple partners to work together on complex programs. Our platforms incorporate security and data sovereignty priorities from the very outset.
Big data helps us provide our civil and military customers with management, analysis, and decision-making tools based on shared, supervised, and sovereign data. The digital twins of our aircraft replicate their life cycles, allowing us to engage in predictive maintenance and maximize fleet availability.
The ongoing development of our manufacturing processes and our production ecosystem is key to achieving the high levels of quality and competitiveness demanded by the global market. Our manufacturing operations draw on a supply chain comprising 400 companies in France and an expanding international network of partners.
The purchase of 62 Rafale fighters has strengthened our over 70-year relationship with India, thanks to an increased sharing of workloads and technologies, which have led in turn to sustained benefits in terms of competitiveness.
Since the start of production in 2020, our Nagpur plant has been steadily expanding its operations, and the construction of a new manufacturing unit is scheduled to begin in early 2026. It is set to become the first Falcon Center of Excellence outside of France, manufacturing the front fuselage of the Falcon 2000, 8X, and 6X business jets.
Our partnership with Tata Advanced Systems Limited (TASL), which started in 2025, has begun in earnest with the construction of a factory in Hyderabad to manufacture Rafale fuselage.
We are working actively to support the development of our Indian suppliers. Our local network of partners is growing, and now includes more than 30 companies. This Indian supply chain is providing components of increasing complexity and ever-greater added value. In December 2025, we signed deals with Dynamatic for the production of rear fuselage sections for the Falcon 6X, and with Hical for flight control components.
Our military manufacturing operations are based on dual sourcing, from France and India, while our civil activities focus on locally-based manufacturing supported by continuity plans.
We have put in place a centralized management system to facilitate the ramping up of production, to support our subcontractors and the stakeholders of the Make in India strategy.
All our plants use a single operational performance system, shared with our key suppliers in the interest of enhancing overall resilience.
Our supply chain consists primarily of companies based in France.
Our Cergy plant, which was inaugurated in September 2025, is now fully operational and will enable us to meet our production output targets.
The introduction of the Falcon 10X has necessitated the construction of new purpose-built buildings: namely, the 10X simulator, in Istres; a building devoted to wing box systems, in Martignas; new units to handle the assembly and fitting out of the Falcon 10X, in Mérignac; and two new buildings (painting and fitting) in Little Rock.