ANPK Sukhoi privatisation gets underway according to Sukhoi,but what will emerge still seems uncertain

Published: 11/12/1999

It seems that the long awaited implementation of the privatisation of ANPK Sukhoi from State Unitary Enterprise, established in 1996 under a Presidential decree, into a joint stock company (JCS) may finally be happening. The aviation military-industrial complex includes a variety of aerospace enterprises including the Sukhoi Design Bureau, Beriev Design Bureau and production plants at KnAAPO, NAPO, Taganrog and IAPO (www.concise.org 10th March 1999). The level of state ownership in each of the constituent enterprises within the complex varies, with OKB Sukhoi, the design bureau, partially owned by the state as opposed to the fully state owned production plants of KnAAPO in Komsomolsk-on-Amur and NAPO in Novosibirsk. The first to be privatised will be KnAAPO and NAPO, to be followed by Sukhoi and Beriev according to Yuri Chervakov, Head of the Press and Information Department at Sukhoi. 50% of the production plant's shareholdings will be transferred to JSC Sukhoi, 25% to the regions in which they are based, with the government retaining 25%. The shareholding structures of the final JSC Sukhoi holding company, registered in Moscow, will be 75% owned by the federal government and 25% held by the Moscow authorities. The issue of privatisation is however, not without its opponents and there have been considerable protests since the decision to privatise in August of 1998,from the workforce of KnAAPO and the Khabarovsk regional government in the Russian Far East, concerned that privatisation may lead to the decline of the plant, an important employer in the region (www.concise.org 19th May 1999). According to a restructuring order in the form of a merger between Sukhoi and MAPO developed by First Deputy Prime Minister Yury Masylukov and awaiting the signature of the Prime Minister since February of 1999.The JSC will be an interim step for Sukhoi, but the proposed merger is already behind the scheduled August target cited by Masylukov in the Russian press earlier this year (www.concise.org 30th January 1999.There have also been recent expressions of concern from a number of sources in the industry, that the creation of mechanically generated combinations to restructure the aerospace industry, may simply serve to extend the lives of enterprises that should be curtailed and ignores the performance of those who have responded to the new market economy.

Article ID: 1074