VSMPO-Avisma Corporation started getting smaller orders in the last quarter of 2008, VSMPO-Avisma Corporation’s General Director Mikhail Voyevodin said in his interview to Kommersant.
‘Our customers place their orders at least six months before the manufacturing date, so we usually have orders for the first half of the coming year as early as September. We received plenty of orders in the summer of 2008, but in September and October, our customers started canceling or downsizing their orders. It was clear by December that the year 2009 would be very hard,’ he noted.
‘As a result, we only produced 19,500 tons of titanium, which was 26.5% less than in 2008 and 28.8% less than in the booming year 2007. VSMPO-Avisma Corporation’s sales revenues amounted to 26 billion RUR last year, which was 10% less than in 2008 and 15% less than in 2007. Our net profit dropped down to 175 million RUR in 2009. This was 15.3 times less than a year earlier and 35.5 times less than a year before that. To make matters worse, it is now impossible for us to keep building up on our capacity the way we did this in 2006-2008. I don’t believe we can expect any return on investment in 2009-2010,’ Mikhail Voyevodin observed.