Chairman of the United Shipbuilding Corporation Board of Directors Georgy Poltavchenko: Mr President, I would like to report that the USC has shown fairly good growth dynamics in recent years. I can say that the number of ships delivered to the Navy has increased almost three-fold over the past five years, and the number of repaired warships has almost tripled. Civilian shipbuilding is showing good dynamics as well.
Separately, I would like to note that procurement activities have been properly centralised, which, in principle, has allowed us to save about 25 billion rubles over the same period. Importantly, corporate earnings are on the rise.
The USC group of enterprises has grown by a factor of 1.5 compared with 2014. A certain consolidation and promotion of cooperation are underway. Today, cooperation includes about 30 enterprises which has never been the case with the USC as every company used to operate independently, unfortunately.
There are a number of other positive developments that I would like to point out, including matters related to creating new jobs. We plan to have over 97,000 jobs by the end of 2019. In recent years, we have added almost 5,000 new jobs.
Given that all these enterprises provide employment to entire towns and that the jobs imply fairly high skill levels, the salary is not bad, which, of course, makes us optimistic about the future. All the more so as we have major orders both in civilian shipbuilding and in implementing the programme to modernise the Navy.
By the way, we have 78 civilian shipbuilding projects underway. We consider the expansion of shipbuilding in the interest of developing the Northern Sea Route, in particular, the icebreaker fleet, as a serious opportunity for us.
There are, of course, issues that need our attention which are associated, among other things, with certain obsolescence and physical wear of fixed assets, in particular, the dock equipment.
I would like to report on this topic in more detail, because we have a programme for renovating and building new docks, especially docks for repairing and building modern ships, including naval ships.
Vladimir Putin: Is it 97,500 jobs?
Georgy Poltavchenko: Yes, there are 97,500 employees at the USC.
Vladimir Putin: I see that a single centralised budgeting process has been put in place which is also important.
Georgy Poltavchenko: Yes, it took us a while to make it happen, but today we have a single budgeting process, a single information technology system and a single personnel management system.
Today, we can say that the USC is a fairly established group of companies managed by the parent company, United Shipbuilding Corporation.
Vladimir Putin: Good.
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