| The White House wants to create a unified aircraft manufacturing corporation in a year and a half The draft presidential decree on the creation of the United Aircraft Company (UAC), which the Ministry of Industry and Energy presented yesterday for consideration by the government commission on military-industrial issues, was not agreed upon with other departments. Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov announced this before the start of the commission meeting. Nevertheless, a fundamental decision on this matter has actually already been made. According to the head of the Ministry of Industry and Energy Viktor Khristenko, the project should be finalized no later than April 25. Soon after this, the decree is expected to be signed by the president, and the government will adopt a corresponding resolution.
The process of merging numerous aircraft manufacturing enterprises that Russia inherited from the USSR proceeded very sluggishly and chaotically until February 23, 2005, but on that day it received a new energetic impetus. The impetus was given personally by Vladimir Putin at a visiting meeting of the State Council at the Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute (Zhukovsky). There, the president approved the concept of creating the UAC presented by Mr. Khristenko, and rejected alternative ideas and projects.
The plan for unifying the aviation industry, outlined by Viktor Khristenko yesterday at the commission on military-industrial issues, generally repeats what he reported in Zhukovsky. Perhaps the only significant change that the project has undergone in these weeks concerns the size of the expected state participation in the capital of the future UAC, within the framework of which assets that are now both government-owned and privately owned should be merged. “We can still talk about the state’s share as an estimate, but preliminary in its final form this share will be 55-60%,” Mr. Khristenko told reporters after the commission meeting. Previously, he thought that the state share in the UAC would be no less than 70%. The final figure will be determined by an audit and an independent assessment of the property of the merged enterprises.
At the first stage, it is planned to concentrate the shares of aircraft manufacturing enterprises owned by the state in the hands of a specially created state-owned enterprise. This process, according to Mr. Khristenko, will not take much time - about a month and a half from the date of the presidential decree. True, the minister immediately made a reservation that at the same time it would be necessary to corporatize three large enterprises that now have the status of federal state unitary enterprises - the Russian Aircraft Corporation MiG, the Kazan Aviation Production Association and the Experimental Machine-Building Plant named after V.M. Myasishcheva. A Vremya Novostei source in aviation industry circles expressed the opinion that the procedure for corporatizing these companies will take at least the rest of 2005. Thus, speaking about a period of one and a half months, Mr. Khristenko most likely meant those state assets that are located in already existing joint-stock companies. The reformed federal state unitary enterprises, apparently, should merge into the UAC at a later stage. Private enterprises will be the last to enter. Among the “first tier” aircraft manufacturing companies in Russia there is only one - the Irkut Corporation. The state owns just over 13% of its shares, with the rest distributed among private investors.
According to the Minister of Industry, the “final shape” should be given to the UAC by December 2006. “This is an extremely tense period, one might say unprecedented, but we expect that we will complete all organizational issues, perhaps without holding a single action by this deadline,” said Mr. Khristenko. But in the end, he sees UAC as a company operating “in a single share mode.” It should include “business units for the creation of military, civil, transport and unmanned equipment.” “At the start, the corporation’s turnover will be $2.5-2.8 billion, the lion’s share of which will be military products,” the minister said. By 2015, he expects, the turnover of the united Russian aviation industry will increase to $8.5 billion, and the structure of production will radically change in favor of civilian products. Vera KUZNETSOVA, Mikhail KUKUSHKIN |
|
