The story
Founded by Artem Mikoyan and Mikhail Gurevich on Dec 8, 1939, in Moscow.1
Mikoyan was established on 8 December 1939 as the Pilot Design Department of the Aviation Plant #1 and headed by Artem Mikoyan and Mikhail Gurevich. It was later renamed "Experimental Design Bureau named after A.I. Mikoyan" otherwise known as the Mikoyan Design Bureau or Mikoyan OKB. In 1964 Gurevich retired, and Mikoyan died in 1970. He was succeeded by Rostislav A. Belyakov, and in 1978 the enterprise was named after Mikoyan.
In 1995, Mikoyan OKB was merged with two production facilities to form the Moscow Aviation Production Association "MiG" (MAPO-MiG). In the 1990s MiG began developing Mikoyan Project 1.44, a fifth-generation jet fighter, but the project was hampered by a lack of funding and was eventually canceled.
In December 1999, Nikolai Nikitin was appointed the corporation's General Director and General Designer. Nikitin focused most of the company's resources on the development of the Tu-334 passenger aircraft at the expense of military programs. This prompted the resignation in December 1999 of many of its leading military aircraft designers, including the chief designers and their deputies for the MiG-29 and MiG-31 programs.
Nikitin was replaced by Valery Toryanin in November 2003, who was in turn replaced by Alexey Fedorov in September 2004. In 2006, the Russian government merged 100% of Mikoyan shares with Ilyushin, Irkut, Sukhoi, Tupolev, and Yakovlev as a new company named United Aircraft Corporation. Specifically, Mikoyan and Sukhoi were placed within the same operating unit.
MiG failed to win any major aircraft tenders in the post-Soviet era, falling behind its Russian rival Sukhoi. According to press reports, the company was shedding hundreds of employees in late 2017 due to a shortage of orders.
As of 2015 the company's business offering consists mostly of modernized MiG-29 aircraft. MiG was developing a 4++ fighter, the MiG-35, with the first deliveries expected in late 2019. Mikoyan was set to fly the PAK DP aka MiG-41 their first stealth interceptor in 2025. However as of 2026, the aircraft is still under development.
From Wikipedia’s article on Mikoyan, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5