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| Sunday, 12 June 2005 |
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Russia pins hopes on regional jets to lift civil aviation industry MOSCOW, Saturday (AFP) Leading Russian aircraft manufacturers will turn out in force at the Paris Air Show next week to push plans to build and sell a new line of mid-range passenger jets that Russia hopes will revive its flagging civil aviation industry. "Now is a very important moment - it is a chance to jump-start the industry" in Russia, said Gairat Salimov, an analyst with the Troika Dialog brokerage firm in Moscow. "If by 2007 nothing is created, commercial airlines will not be able to wait to renew their fleets" and Russia will have to open its domestic market to competition from foreign passenger aircraft manufacturers. Of about 300 enterprises, design bureaus and assembly plants involved in the production of airplanes, scattered throughout Russia's vast territory, only those that make military planes - and export them to China and India - and helicopters have managed to hold market share since the 1991 break-up of the Soviet Union. In 2003 alone, Russian military aviation sales, spearheaded by manufacturers Irkut, Sukhoi and MiG, exceeded 2.5 billion dollars (2.05 billion euros), compared with a paltry 100,000 dollars in sales from the civil aviation sector, where production has been reduced to minimum levels for the past 12 years. |
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