The management of the Sukhoi company is studying the possibility of moving production from Komsomolsk-on-Amur to China. The Khabarovsk Krai’s First Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Affairs Aleksandr Levintal announced this at a roundtable in Khabarovsk, the Vedomosti publication reports.

Levintal said that he obtained this information from the leadership of the company, with whom he recently discussed the prospects of the Komsomol aircraft factory. “For Sukhoi, it is necessary for production of aircraft to increase by 15-20% per year, but there are no human resources for this,” the official said.

Levintal said that personnel were not being hired "in Komsomolsk, in the Far East, or in Russia." According to him, "employment centers throughout the country offered jobs on our terms” over a period of six months on the orders of Deputy Prime Minister Olga Golodets, “but there was nobody with the right skills."

Oleg Skufinsky, an adviser to the Minister for Development of the Far East, promised to "carefully deal with the management of Sukhoi” when he leaned about the idea of moving Sukhoi’s production to China.

Sukhoi signed an agreement on sale of 100 Sukhoi Superjet 100 aircraft to the private airline O-bay Aircraft Company (China) on March 22. According to reports by China Daily, the value of the deal was USD 3.54 billion. It was also reported that Sukhoi would help the Chinese side to establish an assembling plant in Zhengzhou City, the administrative center of the Henan province. The Chinese assembly line for the Superjet aircraft will begin operation in 2016 and reach its design capacity in 2018.

The Huanqiu Shibao newspaper wrote on March 26 that the O-bay Aircraft Company expected to create about 500,000 new jobs in the province of Henan thanks to the agreement with Sukhoi.

The Gagarin Komsomolsk-on-Amur Aircraft Plant (KNAAZ) produces fighter jets of the Su-27 family, and it has been participating in the Superjet 100 regional aircraft program since 2003. Sukhoi produces the fuselage, the detachable part of the wings, and the pylons of the aircraft, but the final assembly is performed at the Sukhoi Civil Aircraft subsidiary company’s manufacturing facilities in Komsomolsk-on-Amur. According to the plans of the United Aircraft Corporation, the production volume at KNAAZ is expected to more than triple by 2015, compared with 2010.