Isn't the 055 successor still farther off than the 9-10k ton 052D successor? I wonder why they didn't just procure a couple more 055s instead of even more 052Ds.
The last costings I saw were:
Type-055 is 6 billion RMB
Type-052D is 3.5 billion RMB
You can see the Type-055 is a lot more expensive