After the first summit, "we have seen an extremely prolonged period of the Sochi talks. From 2019 to the present, we have signed more than 150 contractual documents with African partners and increased our backlog by more than 10 billion dollars," said the company president, Alexander Mikheev, quoted by the Russian agency TASS.
"During that time, we expanded our presence by adding five new countries on the" African continent, revealed Mikheev, without saying which countries they were, in a meeting with journalists that precedes the second Russia-Africa summit, taking place Thursday and Friday in Saint Petersburg.
For Rosoboronexport, the summit is a unique event that "allows to find new growth points in cooperation with partners".
The expectation, admitted the president of the company, is that the summit "will help Rostec, Rosoboronexport and other Russian companies to maintain and strengthen ties with traditional partners, find reliable customers and start developing new market segments".
Rosoboronexport, which has a monopoly on developing, manufacturing and exporting high-tech defense products, has already announced that it will hold, alongside the summit, a "demonstration of the tools developed and tested in Russia to combat terrorism, crime organization, cyber threats, protect the constitutional system and public order, provide security and surveillance of borders and critical facilities".
Its mission is to take advantage of the event to "elaborate concepts to address the main challenges to the African global security architecture", together with delegations from the countries of the continent who will be in St. Petersburg, added Mikheev.
The Russia-Africa summit, where more than 40 African countries are expected to participate, including Angola and South Africa, starts on Thursday, with Moscow counting on the number and level of African representations to show that it has not been isolated by the offensive in Ukraine, and access to Ukrainian and Russian cereals and fertilizers is expected to dominate the meeting.
