One senior procurement official familiar with the program said the Turkish government has concluded that the Chinese proposal was technologically satisfactory, allowed technology transfer and was much cheaper than rival proposals.

The decision to select the Chinese contender awaits final approval from Defense Minister Ismet Yilmaz and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The decision would be finalized and officially announced at the next meeting of the Defense Industry Executive Committee, chaired by Erdogan, which oversees major procurement decisions. No date has been set for the meeting.

The HQ-9 (FD-2000 export version) is China’s new generation medium- to long-range, active radar homing air defence missile. The most basic formation of a HQ-9 batteries consisted of one Type 305B search radar, one tracking radar, one 200kW Diesel generator truck, and eight Transporter erector launchers (TELs) each with 8 missiles, totaling 32 rounds ready to fire. The HQ-9 is a two-stage missile.

Turkey has launched the T-Loramids program to purchase an air defense system. The T-Loramids is a $4 billion program to buy long-range missile and air-defense systems. For the contract, the pan-European Eurosam, maker of the SAMP/T Aster 30, is competing with a U.S. partnership, composed of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, maker of Patriot air defense systems; Russia’s Rosoboronexport, marketing the S300; and China’s CPMIEC (China Precision Machinery Export-Import Corp.), offering its HQ-9 (FD-2000).

A Western industry source said that US officials have warned the Turkish bureaucrats several times about the potential difficulties in achieving interoperability if Turkey decided to go for a Chinese or a Russian architecture.