Expert: Russian shipbuilding is noncompetitive in world market

"Our domestic shipbuilding industry cannot provide for not only foreign needs, but domestic as well," Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Director-General of Krylov Research Institute Valentin Pashin announced at a shipbuilding conference in St. Petersburg today.

Pashin noted that such situation in the Russian shipbuilding was caused by "noncompetitiveness of the Russian shipbuilding industry, both civil and military."

According to Pashin, one of the reasons of the competitiveness is neglect for scientific research in ship designing and building. "Quality of the produce is 50-percent dependent of applied scientific and technical studies and 25-percent dependant on development effort," he noted adding: "For the last years, about 200mn rubles were sent for development of shipbuilding, although billions were spent for other industries." In this connection, he stressed that "development program has been just started being developed for the period from 2009 to 1016." "There has been no special shipbuilding program up to now, although in aviation and space exploration there were seven of them," Pashin said.

The academician noted that another problem of shipbuilding is depreciation of facilities. "Today, over 50% facilities related to construction of ships and design bureaus are either under reconstruction or modernization, so there is a threatening trend of freezing military shipbuilding," Pashin said. Summing up, he said that within frameworks of developing the program for shipbuilding for 2009-2016, seven directions are outlined: shelf development, scientific research, new image of shipbuilding, shipbuilding, marine equipment manufacturing, ship engineering, power engineering and various research systems.

sections: Society