STLC wants to lease cargo drones

“State transport leasing company” (STLC) is working on the issue of creating a program for the preferential leasing of unmanned aerial systems (UAS), the company’s CEO Evgeny Dietrich told reporters at the Eastern Economic Forum.

According to him, given the lack of mass production of cargo drones in Russia, their cost may exceed 100 million rubles. “With the increase in domestic mass production based on Russian components, their price may decrease by three to five times,” Dietrich noted.

The top manager expects that in two or three years, unmanned delivery will become one of the full-fledged logistics tools, and drones themselves will be widely used in agriculture and forestry. The creation of the market, in his opinion, will also lead to an increase in demand for avionics, ground support, specialized software products, pilot simulators, etc.

According to the STLC forecast, by 2025 the regulatory and technical base for the provision of mass services in this area will be formed, by 2027 – business support mechanisms will be implemented, by 2030 – “the phase of sustainable growth” of the Russian UAS market will be reached.

To achieve these indicators, according to Dietrich, it is necessary to accelerate the import substitution of unmanned aerial vehicles.

In June last year, the maximum amount of funding for the initiative to develop unmanned air cargo delivery in Russia in 2021-2024 was . was estimated at 3.4 billion rubles. from the National Wealth Fund and 300 million rubles. additional appropriations from the federal budget (Vedomosti wrote about this on October 21, 2021).

As they wrote RBC in mid-July, citing a STLC representative, by 2027 the company wants to purchase 400 drones for 5.5 billion rubles in order to supply them to the new airline Unmanned Aerial Systems in 2022–2027. In 2022, STLC plans to receive the first six drones, in 2023 their number will increase to 20 units, and in 2024 to 50 units.

Experimental flights of drones “Unmanned aerial systems” are planned to begin this year, and commercial flights (with a mass of up to 30 kg) – from the second half of 2023, a representative of the STLC reported on August 23. As a test zone, “hard-to-reach regions of the north and east of Russia, the Arctic zone, where infrastructure is not developed” are considered.

The volume of investments required to create a full-fledged production of drones in Russia, the head of the NRA rating service, Sergey Grishunin, estimated at 12-16 billion rubles.

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