VARD (a Fincantieri ) established in Vung Tau in 2006. Their presence must be over 10 years in Vietnam.
This is a long story.
at first Vietnam ordered BPS-500 as the design with some clean appearance for a KH-35 Launcher to be built domestically.
The development considered as failed after the progress is slow with first prototype (HQ-381) has some major flaws.
Surely, Vietnam deposited budget to develop that design. Russia showed the risk of newly developing design could be disaster. That changed the mind of Vietnam, now they only order proven platforms even with the older design as KH-35 launchers.
Molniya or Tarantul-V is not the first gen of its kind. And 16x of KH-35 on Molniya is unavailable anywhere but designed as requested by Vietnam for KH-35 launchers.
To think about Molniya as naval Bal-E system, we would guess that actually what Vietnam want is KH-35 and its launchers are needed no matter it's BPS-500 or Molniya. Vietnam never buy a gun without ammo, especially the gun can shoot superfast, use many ammo.
8x Molniya plus 4xGepard require nearly 200x KH-35 per salvo.
So the ToT of KH-35 must be the top in the list. And saw it somewhere in lab, or in the workshop in Vietnam for years, even a little earlier than with the keel laying of first domestic Molniya.
So I'm sure the contract is for both Molniya and KH-35 to be localized.
Rumors said that the first 6 Molniya as we know, but next 4 would be modernized, as we mentioned that the first PBS-500 was fixed the design flaws and just joined the ADMM+ exercise in Brunei. I guess that's the test bed for some changes would be made in next Molniya. Maybe there're some way for its self defense and improvement of the appearance.
View attachment 304102
Someone told us Vietnam would buy coastal Bal-E, but I know Vietnam Never buy it, once they could make it.
Localized Molniya cost could be around 50 million