Is that the at-cost price?
Chinese air to air missiles
- Thread starter tphuang
- Start date
The guy, Hua Bin, writes about geopolitics, is a memeber of The China Acadamy and has a business background.
Plus, given that the missile is automatedly mass-produced hence the figure seems plausible.
Good enough for me Deino
I think contract information is more credible. Considering each AIM-120D3 costs 3m dollars, it is more reasonable that the price of the PL-15 is 1m-1.5m dollars than 180k dollars.
Yeah, $180K for a PL-15 just seems way too low
Let's get a ball park number of required PL-15 per aircraft; so we know PAF acquired 240 PL-15Es for 20 J-10CEs --> That's 12 missiles per fighter.
How many Fighters of PLAAF/PLANAF require a PL-15? J-20/-16/-10s/11s/15/35 (not including russian flankers/J-7) are total 1283 Fighters.
1283 Fighters x 12 PL-15s = 15 396 PL-15s required for combat rediness without reserves.
Now we multiply 15'396 with 1 million unit cost-price. Thats $15.4 Billion just for PL-15s.
Now here comes in the trick with China's industy 4.0 master stroke: Invest some of that required $15.4 Billion in automation.
How many other missiles might/could share the same production platform with PL-15? SD-30 comes to mind, PL-10 etc. But lets for a moment stick with PL-15s. Let's utilize the synergies of our factories, lets run with lights off and without manual labour over the weekend/ chinese new year. And you can cut the cost-price down from a $1 Mio. to $180k per unit.
Don't compre the run-down western/american rusted excuse of an idustrial base with China. It's a different ball game. The west uses AI to make cool social media content. China has been using block chain for their suplly chain management before Chat-GPT was concieved.
That's in my opion of course.