Synopsis:-The company has signed an MoU with FLYING WHALES to build heavy-lift airships in India, adding a new aerospace segment to a defence business that already carries an order book of around Rs. 11,000 crore.
India’s defence manufacturing push has mostly been about tanks, artillery and missiles so far, the kind of hardware that shows up in headlines and parades. Airships have stayed a niche curiosity everywhere in the world, useful in theory for moving heavy cargo into places without runways, but never quite commercially proven at scale. That’s starting to change as militaries look for logistics options that don’t depend on airstrips, and it’s this gap that this defence stock is now stepping into.
With a market capitalisation of Rs. 1,04,591.45 crore, the shares of Bharat Forge were trading at Rs. 2,187.70 apiece, down 0.64 percent from its previous closing price of Rs. 2,201.80. It is trading at a P/E of around 95.79.
What’s the News?
Bharat Forge, through its Aerospace Division, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with FLYING WHALES, a French-Canadian company that specialises in heavy-lift airship technology, to jointly develop and manufacture airships in India for defence and strategic use. The MoU was signed at the Farnborough International Airshow by Guru Biswal, CEO of Bharat Forge Aerospace, and Sébastien Bougon, President of FLYING WHALES. The stated goal is to build these aircraft domestically under the government’s Make in India and Aatmanirbhar Bharat programmes, rather than importing the technology outright.
The centrepiece of the deal is the LCA60T, an airship designed to carry up to 60 tonnes of cargo, with vertical take-off and landing and no need for the kind of ground infrastructure a regular airport requires. That combination matters for the Indian military specifically, since large parts of the border with China and Pakistan sit in mountainous or high-altitude terrain where building or maintaining runways is difficult and expensive. Applications being explored include supplying forward operating bases, moving oversized equipment, intelligence and surveillance missions, communication relay, and disaster relief in remote regions.
What is on their back?
This MoU doesn’t exist in isolation. Bharat Forge’s defence business currently carries an order book of roughly Rs. 11,000 crore, which management has said on its FY26 earnings call gives revenue visibility stretching three to four years out. That’s a meaningful cushion for a business segment that used to be a much smaller part of the company’s overall picture.
Order inflows through FY26 back up that visibility. The company won Rs. 4,814 crore of fresh orders across its businesses during the year, with defence contributing Rs. 2,816 crore of that, the largest single share. The traditional forgings business added Rs. 1,210 crore, K-Drive brought in Rs. 500 crore, and JSA contributed Rs. 292 crore. Defence alone accounting for more than half of fresh order inflows says something about where the company’s growth is currently concentrated, even as its legacy auto-components business keeps ticking along.
Significance of the MoU
An MoU is not a contract, and there’s no rupee figure attached to this airship partnership yet, so it would be a mistake to treat this as an immediate addition to the order book. What it does is open a new segment where Bharat Forge previously had no presence: airships sit somewhere between aerospace and heavy logistics, and very few companies globally have manufacturing experience here, which limits competition if the localisation programme actually gets built out.
The bigger financial logic is optionality. Bharat Forge already has aerospace and defence manufacturing capability from other programmes, so layering airship production on top doesn’t require starting from scratch.
If the Indian military does end up procuring these platforms at any scale, given the geography-driven use case, the order sizes in aerospace defence programmes tend to run well into the thousands of crores over multi-year timelines. That’s the upside case. The downside is that heavy-lift airships remain commercially unproven anywhere in the world, and defence procurement in India has a well-documented habit of moving slower than press releases suggest.
What Should Investors Look Out For?
The near-term test for this partnership is whether the MoU converts into an actual manufacturing programme with a firm order and timeline, since MoUs at airshows are common and not all of them translate into revenue. Investors should also watch whether Bharat Forge’s overall defence order book, currently around Rs. 11,000 crore, continues growing at the pace FY26’s Rs. 2,816 crore in fresh defence orders suggests, or whether this year proves to be a peak.
Given the stock already trades at a P/E near 95.79, a meaningful part of future growth across defence and aerospace appears to be priced in already, which raises the bar for how much incremental news, including this airship deal, needs to move the needle before it shows up in earnings rather than just sentiment.
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