Russia has completed the long-running merger of Sukhoi and MiG, combining them into one company under United Aircraft Corporation (UAC).
The Unified State Register of Legal Entities has been officially modified to reflect the changes on July 1, 2022, erasing the two companies that, in one or another form, have existed since the 1930s.
“The world-famous Sukhoi and MiG brands will be retained in the aircraft they manufacture, and the authoritative design schools will continue to develop,” Sergei Chemezov, the CEO of Rostec, is quoted in UAC press release.
UAC itself is a subsidiary of Rostec, a state-owned corporation that owns over 700 enterprises, including nearly the entirety of Russia’s military-industrial complex.
The corporation was founded in 2006 to consolidate numerous Russian aerospace manufacturers that struggled to retain relevancy after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
It now unites Ilyushin, Irkut, Mikoyan, Sukhoi, Tupolev, Yakovlev and others as its subsidiaries. Until recently, Sukhoi and MiG retained separate management and separate facilities.
In 2020, the decision to merge the two companies was announced, as their management had been gradually consolidated. The companies were moved into one facility in March 2021, and their final merger has been approved in November of the same year.
Sukhoi and MiG (then – Mikoyan-Gurevich) were both established in 1939 as experimental design bureaux and played a major role in Soviet aviation design, creating and building various aircraft for the Soviet military.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the bureaux were reorganized into companies. While Sukhoi eventually regained its prominence, designing a wide variety of combat aircraft based on the Soviet-era Su-27 platform, MiG was not as successful, with the MiG-35, a further development of the MiG-29, struggling to attract orders.