| It is important to emphasize that the authors are talking specifically about CNC machines. In this category, Russia was in love with the European CNC vendors. And the vendors had an awesome market in Russia, because Russian managers eagerly ordered very expensive, very high quality German and Swiss machines -- machines which not even many of American companies could afford. (For many applications, an American-made Haas machining center would be perfectly adequate, and would cost several times less than a "similar" German machine.) European machines were great. The geographical distance was short, which helped with the service. There were almost no barriers. The vendors had web pages and customer service in Russian, with pre-certification of machines to Russian state regulations, etc. Operators got trained on Siemens Sinumerik simulators, which were freely downloadable. As for the Chinese industry, although in CNC tools it almost certainly lags behind Germany (like everybody else does), it certainly imports the best German machinery on a massive scale, and when it comes to manufacturing hi-tech missile components, it runs circles around Russians. It is also not strictly true that Russian domestic machine tool industry is dead. In fact, it has been recovering somewhat. There are several factories, some of which build machines from scratch, and some that assemble machines from imported components. There are also continuing imports of machines and service parts through third parties. In fact, after the beginning of the war, overall imports of manufacturing equipment increased, compared to the preceding period. So while I think the report is interesting, it does not give a full picture. |
If that's true, then that fact would seem to undermine the whole policy thrust of this report, which seems to be the implementation of very broad sanctions against machine tools to damage the Russia war effort. It might be easy to identify, say, a large Azerbaijani advanced machine tool order as a Russia front to violate sanctions, but based on what you say, I don't it would be possible to identify a Russia front operating through a Chinese intermediary.