Two of Russia’s most famous aircraft manufacturers, Sukhoi and MiG, are going to be merged into one company under the leadership of United Aircraft Corporation (UAC), according to company’s press release.
The decision was taken in the last UAC directorate meeting on November 30, 2021, according to a press release from UAC. The full extent of the reorganization of the companies is going to be decided in the next meeting, in January 2022.
The integration of the two companies has been going on for some time. UAC was founded in 2006 in an attempt to consolidate the management of Russia’s numerous aerospace manufacturers, with Ilyushin, Irkut, Mikoyan, Sukhoi, Tupolev, and Yakovlev as its subsidiaries.
After that, MiG and Sukhoi went through a series of closer cooperation, the last of them in May 2021, when the two companies were relocated into a single facility.
The top management of Sukhoi has also been running MiG. This resulted in a three-step structure, where MiG reported to Sukhoi, which, in turn, was owned by UAC. The new structure is going to have just two steps, with UAC managing Sukhoi and MiG as a single entity.
According to the newspaper Kommersant, the idea to merge the two companies first appeared in 2017, before Russian state conglomerate Rostec announced in 2020 an intention to end the existence of Sukhoi and MiG as separate companies.
Since 2018, UAC has been part of Rostec – a state conglomerate that also owns United Engine Corporation (UEC), Russian Helicopters, Kalashnikov Concern and a host of other Russian companies.
According to UAC, even though the design and manufacturing capabilities of Sukhoi and MiG will be fully integrated, the two brands will be retained, although the exact way they are going to be applied was not specified.
Both Sukhoi and MiG (formerly known as Mikoyan or Mikoyan and Gurevich) were founded in 1930s as constructor bureaus named after their chief engineers – Pavel Sukhoi, Artemy Mikoyan and Mikhail Gurevich respectively. After the fall of the Soviet Union, they were eventually reorganized into standalone companies.