LuckyGunner.com interviews President of Tula Ammo

They recently sat down with Alexei Solovov, current President of Tula Ammo and found out a lot about the company and the Russian Ammunition market. Here are a few highlights:

Surprisingly, the Tula and Ulyanovsk factories are presently 100% privately owned.

Interestingly, the Tula plant initially produced brass-cased ammunition and didn’t switch to producing steel casings until the late 1920’s to conserve precious metals.  Russia boasts of large iron reserves and by switching to producing casings made of the more economical steel material, Russia was able to conserve its strategic non-ferrous metals for its other industrial material needs. 

Today, the plant produces 40 types of small arms ammunition for both the commercial market and the Russian military.  Tula Cartridge Plant currently exports to over 20 countries around the world, most notably:  the United States, Germany, France, Finland, England, and the Netherlands.

So, how big are the Russian factories and what is their annual output?  Understandably, these are both national and trade secrets, but Alexei tipped his hand that the collective ammunitionvolume imported into the United States alone from these two factories was approximately 500 Million rounds in 2009.  To put that into perspective, that’s almost 16 rounds per second 365 days a year that are imported into the US domestic market!  To further explain the scale of Mr. Solovov’s production potential, the production capacity of the Tula and Ulyanovsk factories compares favorably to that of of ATK (Federal, CCI, Speer, et al), Remington, and Winchester combined.

Read the rest here