OREANDA-NEWS. January 26, 2012. On January, 18th 2012 the management of the united industrial company Oboronprom OJSC and MC United engine corporation OJSC headed by the general director, a member of general committee of Russia’s union of machine builders Andrey Reus visited NPO Saturn.

The delegates of Oboronprom attended a meeting with the top-management of NPO Saturn during which the company’s performance in 2011 and its development plans for 2012 were reviewed. A dedicated discussion took place on the implementation of the Federal Target Program “Development of the defense-industrial complex” including the execution of work on the marine engine program; the current status of the SaM146 program; execution of work regarding the PD-14 engine and a number of other items.

Andrey Reus, head of Oboronprom and MC ODK shared some insight on the purpose of his visit to the NPO Saturn main industrial site in Rybinsk:

“Traditionally I start the year by visiting all the companies in the Oboronprom state corporation. 

This year I started my tour in Rybinsk. One of the key companies in our corporation and in the entire industry as well – NPO Saturn – is located here. In the past few years we have been able to lead the Rybinsk industrial cluster out of crisis and right now it is a dynamically-developing system. Here crucial questions with regard to the SaM146 program are solved; here the volume of production has been increased significantly due, among other factors, to the increase of the state defense order. The Rybinsk design bureau has been chosen as the backbone design office for the entire United engine corporation. Here we have a competence center for production tooling that is already operational and serves the needs of the whole corporation. The facilities of a competence center for blades will be concentrated here which is another ODK-wide project. Here in Rybinsk we also have a joint project with General Electric. Here we can clearly see the participation in the key ODK projects. During next ten days we are going to visit all the companies within Oboronprom. The purpose of all these visits – to meet with the companies’ management, to set objectives, to establish customer-supplier relations including the relations in the frame of the competence centers operation”.

Andrey Reus gave a positive evaluation to the operation of both the Oboronprom and ODK corporations in 2011 and noted that for the first time in last six years NPO Saturn had finished the year at a profit:

“I’m content with the production volume indicators; our further goal is to boost performance for achieving which we are going go continue implementing the Lean tools and all the other organizational methods. At the moment the company is loaded to its capacity. So, I consider the achieved results to be very positive but that, in turn, gives us even more tasks to solve in the future”.

Speaking of the government support given to high-tech companies, Andrey Reus stated that the undertaken measures “paid off”. The story of NPO Saturn is a very demonstrative example of that. Per every economic indicator, 2-2,5 years ago the company was on the edge of bankruptcy but it received large-scale government support which allowed to preserve Saturn for the industry. “I’m grateful to the entire team of NPO Saturn that worked well. Here we saw a good synergy of the well-targeted program of support measures and perfect team work. The Rybinsk-based company has a lot of potential for further development. Today, it is one of the fastest-growing companies on the territory of the Russian Federation”, - concluded Andrey Reus.

Research and production association Saturn OJSC – an engine-building company specialized in design, manufacture and aftermarket support of gas-turbine engines for military and civil aviation, power-generation and gas-pumping installations, the Navy boats and commercial ships. NPO Saturn OJSC is part of United engine corporation – a 100% subsidiary of the united industrial company OBORONPROM OJSC with the objective of engine-building asset management.

United industrial company OBORONPROM OJSC – a multi-faceted machine-building group of companies founded in 2002. It is part of GK Russian technologies. Its main fields of business: helicopter building (Helicopters of Russia OJSC), engine building (MC ODK) and other assets.