Monday, January 26, 2004
Russian arms sales in 2003 top $5 bn
AFP
MOSCOW : Russia notched up record weapons sales of more than $5 billion in 2003, arms export company Rosoboronexport said on Monday.
Presenting its own results for the past year, Rosoboronexport said in a statement that it had arms sales of $5.1 billion in 2003.
Rosoboronexport, a mammoth new Russian arms-exporting agency created in 2000 by merging the country's two largest arms exporters, accounts for 94 per cent of Russian weapons sales abroad.
The agency's director general Andrei Belyaninov said Rosoboronexport had managed to boost its defence sales each year by $1 billion dollars since 2001, when they totalled $3.2 billion.
" India and China still remain the strategic partners for Russia but Rosoboronexport continued to expand the geographical spread of its activity," he noted.
The arms agency delivered weapons to 52 countries last year, and began cooperating with new partners from Southeast Asia , including Indonesia , Malaysia , and Vietnam , Belyaninov added.
Sales of navy equipment and air defence weapons systems performed particularly well, the agency said.
Last week Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov announced that Moscow -- after about a decade of negotiations -- has been able to sell the 44,570-tonne Admiral Gorshkov aircraft carrier along with 28 MiG-29K maritime fighter jets for some $1.5 billion.
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