Astra Microwave Products is a defence-electronics company built on a library of proprietary radio-frequency building blocks - chips, modules and subsystems - that it has assembled over three decades and now combines into complete radar, electronic-warfare and satellite systems. It was founded in 1991 by scientists, several from India’s DRDO, originally designing antennas for telecom, and went public in 1994 before pivoting entirely into defence and space. The recurring approach is to enter niche, under-crowded corners of defence technology where it can design a product once, qualify it over years, and then earn from long production runs - what management calls “IP enhancement and IP encashment”.
Business segments
Two engines at different stages - a defence-radar and electronic-warfare core that generates most of the revenue, and a space-and-meteorology unit being carved into a separate listed company - both fed by the same in-house chip-design capability.
1. Radar, electronic warfare and missile electronics: the defence core
The company designs and builds the radio-frequency brains of military radars, electronic-warfare suites and missile-guidance systems, earning through multi-year production contracts from India’s defence establishment.
- From chips to complete systems - Astra makes its own MMIC chips (the tiny gallium-arsenide and gallium-nitride circuits that amplify and steer radar signals), with a portfolio of more than 40 chips developed since 2005; this lets it control the core technology instead of buying it, and it is one of the few private Indian firms that can supply these chips up to 40 GHz.
- Paid to develop, then paid to produce - development orders from DRDO labs come with a 15-25% advance, and once a system is qualified, production orders follow with no advance but at higher volumes; development work typically makes up 15-20% of annual revenue and feeds the production pipeline.
- Two ways to fill the factory - under “Build To Specifications,” customers give electrical and mechanical targets and Astra engineers the whole product, which carries better margins; under “Build To Print,” foreign OEMs share finished designs and Astra manufactures them in India as a capacity filler, having produced over USD 150 million worth of modules this way.
- The Su-30 upgrade is a platform-wide opportunity - Astra holds a development-cum-production-partner role for a major electronic-warfare upgrade of India’s Su-30 fighter fleet, a program that locks in demand across the entire aircraft fleet once the design is proven.
- Moving from supplier to product owner - the company is now creating three radars it fully designed itself, with the first “non-company, non-customer” demonstration aimed at Indian forces and export markets, shifting it from a tier-2 subsystem maker to a tier-1 systems house.
2. Space, meteorology and hydrology: the carve-out growth engine
Astra supplies the communication payloads for Indian satellites and builds complete Doppler weather-radar systems, and this unit is being demerged into a separate listed entity to give it dedicated focus.
- On every major Indian satellite since 2008 - the company entered the space program in 2003-04 when ISRO opened up to private industry, and has since contributed RF components and subsystems to 25 satellites and 15 strategic programs.
- Weather radars from X-band to C-band - it delivered 10 X-band Doppler weather radars to the India Meteorological Department in 2021 and C-band versions in 2025, and also builds wind-profiler radars and automatic weather stations for hydrology monitoring.
Group structure and partners
Astra operates through a web of subsidiaries and joint ventures that extend its technology reach - a captive Singapore chip-design house, a software-defined-radio factory with an Israeli partner, and a new satellite entity - while the parent remains the integration hub.
- Aelius Semiconductors (Singapore) - a wholly owned fabless design house that creates GaAs and GaN MMIC chips, has them fabricated at global foundries, and supplies them primarily to the parent on an exclusive basis, giving Astra an internal chip pipeline.
- Astra Rafael Comsys (51:49 JV with Rafael of Israel) - India’s first private military-grade software-defined-radio plant, now also building electro-optic systems; it closed FY26 with an order book of roughly ₹625 crores and sales of ₹360 crores, with recent orders including ₹255.88 crores for Su-30 communication systems and ₹250 crores from HAL.
- Astra Defence Technologies - a wholly owned Indian subsidiary with modern manufacturing and test facilities that handles both high-mix, low-volume defence work and high-volume production, serving the parent on an exclusive basis.
- Astra Space Technologies - the wholly owned subsidiary incorporated in February 2024 that will receive the demerged space and meteorology business and eventually operate as an independent listed company.