In an interview with defensehere.com, the senior business development manager of Naval Group, Philippe Darche, discussed the company’s current business model explaining how they aren’t just providing their customers with the best vessels, but how they are also helping them improve their local industries.
“We are a French company. We design, build and support all classes of surface vessels and submarines, mainly for the French navy, but also a number of foreign customers, foreign navies,” Darche said, adding “We do it for many years now in, in all the lifecycle of a naval vessels, in fact, being from the design, as I said, to the dismantling, if required through the whole support all along the life of the vessel for very different types of the vessel from the universal to smaller and more simple offshore supply vessels and patrolling vessels.”
Talking about the Naval Group’s business model Darche explained “Today, a key factor of success on the naval market is to be able to cooperate with local industries. It is not only a matter of procuring naval assets, but also to be able to provide new skills to an industry. And this is a major aspect of this naval business as we provide it to the Egyptian navy four Gowind vessels totally built by the Egyptian industry after first of class built in France to secure the design, then we provided all the skills and the know how to the Egyptian industry to make them make these sophisticated vessels by themselves.”
Explaining how the market is currently is in regard to submarines, Darche illustrated that there is a growing demand for conventional submarines all over the world, adding “We are quite competitive in this field. We are successful with four major navies in the world on conventional submarines, and there is still prospect all over the world for all classes of these sophisticated vessels”.
