KOMSOMOLSK-ON-AMUR, Russia (Reuters) - Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Monday told Russian companies to buy ships at home to help struggling domestic shipyards but a key client slammed Russian goods as uncompetitive.

Officials are trying to encourage companies to buy more home-produced goods to help Russia through its first recession in a decade and make up for slumping exports.

"I consider it inadmissible to place orders at foreign shipyards when you have the opportunity to build similar ships in Russia. Priority should be given to national industry," Putin said at a meeting on shipbuilding in far eastern Russia.

The sector has been singled out as one of the government's key priorities as part of a long-term plan to diversify the economy from its dependence on energy and commodity exports.

But a fisheries official and a key ship buyer said Russia was not yet ready to compete with foreign companies.

"The far eastern shipbuilding sector had been designed to serve the navy. They cannot work properly with civilian orders, we are not competitive on price and on production schedules," said Andrei Krayniy, head of the Federal Fishing Agency.

"In the Norwegian Sea, where we work with Norwegians, our ships fish next to each other and still our costs are 25 percent higher because of lousy engines," he added.

His comments were echoed by Sergei Frank, general director of Sovcomflot, one of the shipbuilding sector's biggest clients.

"Up to 80 percent of equipment at Russian docks is outdated and it is difficult to build competitive ships," Frank said, adding that a major ship took 30 months to build in Russia but half as long in South Korea.

Illustrating problems in the sector, the Amur Shipbuilding Enterprise — one of the main producers and modernisers of submarines in Soviet days — is on the verge of bankruptcy.

Putin said an agreement has been reached, under which private shareholders would sell a 59 percent stake in the shipbuilder to Russia's largest lender Sberbank for a nominal in fee. Sberbank would then pass the shares into the control of the state United Shipbuilding Corporation (USC).

That would take USC's stake in the factory to around 77 percent. At the same time, state-controlled Sberbank would lend the factory $400 million for 10 years to help modernise it.

"I don't understand how one managed to privatise an enterprise which specialises in producing nuclear submarines," Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov told reporters.

"Private owners have yielded no positive results ... The enterprise found itself on the brink of bankruptcy."