Uzbekistan will build an airport and a factory for a Czech drone manufacturer

Primoco currently has only one production hall in Radotín. From there, he intends to move to the planned new factory at the airport in Písek, but due to the length of the permitting process, its establishment will probably take several more years. The start of production in Uzbekistan as early as next year can therefore represent a way to quickly increase production capacity.

Today, it is limited to one hundred aircraft per year. After the future move to Písek, it should increase to 250 machines. Tashkent alone is expected to offer up to a hundred more drones per year. Last year Primoco delivered 33 of them to customers, this year it plans to sell up to twice as many.

“We are currently creating a joint venture with the Uzbek side. Primoco will control an 85 percent stake in it, the rest will go to the Uzbek Ministry of Transport. In exchange for a 15 percent share, Uzbekistan will build us an airport and a factory on a green field,” explains Semetkovský.

Primoco will thus not have to invest any cash in building the airport and the hall and will not pay rent. “Our investment will thus only be in the order of millions. What would take us years in the Czech Republic is done there in a few months,” adds Semetkovský. Close to the border with Kazakhstan, Primoco will manufacture a complete airframe from composite materials, while motors and electronics will be imported from Prague’s Radotín.

Uzbek Prime Minister Aripov visiting the Primoco factory in Radotín.|Primoco

The general meeting of the manufacturer is to approve the plan at the end of May, and the joint venture is to be established in the coming months. Primoco will also need export licenses and permits from the Ministries of Industry and Trade and Foreign Affairs. “I want to finish the preparations in September. Then the excavators will come out and we will open the hall in December,” plans Semetkovský.

Initially, a team of about twenty Uzbek workers will produce in the hall, whose gross remuneration should be around fifty thousand crowns. They are to make about twelve machines in the next year. Part of them will go to the “hangars” of Uzbekistan, part to other customers with whom Primoco is now finalizing contracts.

The creation of a factory in the region should significantly facilitate negotiations on new contracts with customers from Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Mongolia, Taiwan, Vietnam and the Philippines.

“We chose Uzbekistan also because it has great experience in the aviation industry and qualified mechanics. In the past, Ilyushin planes were manufactured there, today, among others, Airbus has a service center in Tashkent,” adds Semetkovsky. Last year, his company increased its sales sixfold to almost six hundred million crowns and earned over 228 million. Over the past year, the company’s shares traded on the Prague Stock Exchange have appreciated by almost half.

At the same time, Primoco is far from the only Czech company that is building production capacities in Asia in order to expand more easily in the region. For example, the traditional Czech piano and piano manufacturer Petrof has a similar intention. Part of the production will be moved from Hradec Králové to Indonesia, for the first time in the company’s 160-year history, production will be done “by hand”. He will entrust it to an Indonesian company, which will manufacture cheaper types of pianos for Petrof. In an interview for e15 this February, the owner of the company Zuzana Ceralová Petrofová stated this.

For example, Škoda Auto is also expanding in Asia, the car company entered the Vietnamese market last year. Together with the local partner TC Group, he wants to produce and sell at least tens of thousands of Škoda cars a year there.