Turkish company Baykar Makina Sanayi ve Ticaret AS, which supplies Ukraine with Bayraktar drones, says it currently has the capacity to build 20 drones a month and has a three-year backlog of orders, Bloomberg reports.
“The TB2 and Akinci drones are in production, we have demand for both,” said Haluk Bayraktar, the private company’s chief executive officer, in an interview with Ukraine’s Come Back Alive Foundation on Thursday. “For Bayraktar TB2, we have export contracts with 22 different countries.”
Baykar, which is also working on an unmanned combat aircraft project called the Bayraktar Kizilelma, wants to further increase its production capacity and hopes to achieve this with a factory in Ukraine.
Bayraktar, brother of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s son-in-law Selcuk Bayraktar, said the company wants to assemble the TB2 and Akinci drones as well as Kizilelma fighters in Ukraine.
Construction of a research facility and an advanced production center is already underway, he said, adding: “We see Ukraine as our strategic partner. We also want to make Ukraine a production base.”
Turkey has managed to stay close to both Ukraine and Russia this year as it seeks to mediate rather than take sides in war after President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February. Even as Baykar supplies armed drones to Ukraine and looks to build a factory there, Turkey’s exports to Russia hit an eight-year high of $2.9 billion in the first half of 2023.
In a recent interview with the RBC newspaper, Ukraine’s envoy to Turkey said that a Bayraktar TB2 factory could produce unmanned aerial vehicles as early as the end of 2023.
Kyiv has received 50 TB2 drones since the Russian invasion, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said in June.
Source: Capital
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