Geoscan CEO says new drone to take 7 years, billions of rubles

MOSCOW, Jun 23 (PRIME) – It will take Russia about seven years and between hundreds of millions to billions of rubles to create an entirely new unmanned aerial vehicle, Alexei Semyonov, founder and head of the country’s leading drone maker Geoscan, told PRIME on Friday.

“It takes about seven years if it is done from scratch. If it is done from ‘ropes and canes’, so that it flies, it can be done quickly. But in order to produce a competitive drone, everything should be developed, which involves hundreds of millions rubles and many years,” Semyonov said.

The costs depend on complexity and weight, he added.

The executive added that the return to European suppliers of components from the Chinese ones used now is already impossible for Russian drones.

“We understood that problems could occur with U.S. microelectronics for drones and counted on Europe. We did not think that Europe could have behaved in such a way, frankly speaking. Now Europe has shot itself in the foot,” he said.

Many Chinese firms were little known abroad, because they serviced the gigantic internal market and had few documents in English, but now they saw external demand and filled the gap.

“Now the whole world can use cheap Chinese electronics,” Semyonov said.

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