Scandalous but not impossible, no? The Indian tender is completely up in the air, and it would make sense for them to make their best sales pitch. The economies of scale, future upgrade customer, and generally reputation would all make Rafale look better. Meanwhile the smaller Brazilian tender could be viewed as relatively secure because of internal political connections. I don't know if I'm totally missing the mark here, but what do you guys think? Could there be something in it?
Feanor,
IF we assume that the figures above from Salty dog are correct then: 50M USD for one Gripen; Multiply by 126 and you get 6.3 billion. Not 10 billion. Does this also mean that if Gripen wins both in Brazil and India then Brazil is paying more than it should and is sponsoring the Indian sale?
126 Rafale would then cost 8.950 billion USD; compare that to 6.93 billion for the SH (assuming 55 million USD a piece).
If we assume that each rafale in the Brazil tender is 71 million USD, that would be 2.556 billion for 36 planes. In addition there is a lot of other "stuff", which I guess then brings the total cost up to 5 billion.
The examples above show how nonsensical this is.
In order to do even try to do a comparison first one needs to establish what is included in each tender.
Second it becomes important to understand (as already stated in my previous post) what this 10 billion USD figure for India really means. They are running a competition including Mig 35 and Gripen at the low end, F16 and SH "in the middle" and Rafale and Typhoon at the high end of the cost scale. Is this 10 billion figure their total budget? Which could potentially mean that neither Rafale nor Typhoon stands a chance to win, which again would make the comparison to Brazil rather silly. Unless of course the 10 billion is mainly for "fly-away" + a minimum package and was allocated sufficiently large to allow for the most expensive bird in the race to win if IAF decides that's what they need. In which case, if Gripen is chosen in India, they will spend only some 65% of their budget...
Or is it just a rough figure somebody came up with to give a point estimate of what it will be in the end.
This is an interesting discussion but unless the above is more clarified it seems very speculative to me. Perhaps SD and F has the information that I am lacking that allows them to compare those two tenders in a meaningful manner. I would appreciate some links if the information is accessible on the internet.
Thanks.
