NOVO-OGARYOVO, November 19 (Itar-Tass) — Russian President Vladimir Putin has supported a merger of two state-run weapon makers Izhmash and Izhmekh in the Republic of Udmurtia within the framework of the Russian Technologies State Corporation.
The merged enterprise will appear under the common brand – Kalashnikov.
“As for the merger, of course, this is possible,” Putin told a meeting with Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who put forward this idea.
“This merger should improve and in no way worsen the situation,” Putin said. “In such cases many social issues emerge. I ask you to pay priority attention to this.”
“We have to take an important step from the point of view of concentrating manufacturing efforts” like the one that had been taken when a decree to develop the Tactical Missiles Corporation was signed, Rogozin said.
“We unified intellectual and industrial potential to develop such an important direction as the creation of cruise missiles,” he recalled. “Now we focus on the most problematic industry at this moment, which takes our daily efforts – ammunitions and small arms.”
Rogozin recalled that Izhmash and Izhmekh are the country’s most important plants in this sphere, but both of them “are problematic, as they had not had any orders from the Defence Ministry for many years.”
“Many automatic weapons with oil on them are stored at the Defence Ministry’s storage facilities and because of this there are no new orders. But there are orders for civilian, sport and hunting weapons,” he added.
“To consolidate efforts and what is more important to keep Izhevsk’s potential of weapons designers we propose to merge these two enterprises within the framework of the Russian Technologies State Corporation under the common brand – Kalashnikov,” Rogozin said.
“I would like to get support for uniting these industries into such kind of a corporation, where we will gather the designer potential and will be really able to create a modern plant for serial production of small arms,” he addressed Putin.
Putin also called for making stronger efforts in protecting the copyright of Russia’s weapons designers.
Rogozin assured he planned “to start a decisive battle for protection of the copyright of Russian designers on the global market.”
“When I worked in Brussels as Russia’s NATO envoy I often paid attention to absolutely unique, I would say barbaric attitude to those brands that belong to Russia, including replication of our submachine guns and other systems without Russia’s permission and without consideration of its trademark rights,” the deputy prime minister said.