Russia's shipbuilding industry is dependent on foreign suppliers for 70 percent of the electronic equipment installed aboard its ships, despite ongoing government efforts to replace foreign hardware with domestic alternatives, news agency TASS reported Thursday.
“There is a special sphere — an electronics component base and modules where, unfortunately, the dependence on foreign components is about 70 percent,” TASS cited Alexander Navotolsky, the head of import substitution head at United Shipbuilding Corporation (USC), as saying.
President Vladimir Putin has called on major industrial enterprises, such as state-owned USC, to curb their reliance on foreign-sourced components in the wake of last year's ruble devaluation and the onset of Western sanctions against Moscow for its role in the Ukraine conflict.
Navotolsky said that outside the field of electronics, 15 percent of components used in building Russian ships are produced either in member nations of the European Union and NATO or in Ukraine.
Russian shipbuilding is particularly dependent on Ukraine for the supply of engine turbines to power ships. Several Russian military shipbuilding projects have been put on hold for lack of engines after Ukraine's government last year suspended defense-industrial cooperation with Russia.
Navotolsky said the program for import substitution in shipbuilding industry would be finished in 2018. So far, 52 Russian companies have been selected to engage in the import substitution program, he said.
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