Boeing Co has won about 100 orders from China's airlines this year and is on track to meet its full-year target for a country fast becoming a crucial battleground with arch-foe Airbus.
John Bruns, newly appointed vice president for China operations in Boeing's commercial airplanes group, said the airframe manufacturer expects to sustain a 60 to 65 percent share of the Chinese market despite an onslaught from its European rival. Last week, Airbus unveiled a deal to sell 150 narrow-bodied A320 aircraft to China and sealed an agreement to assemble jets in the country's north, at its first plant outside Europe.
Boeing, which won 120 firm orders in China in 2005, has no plans for now to copy that strategy because it had enough capacity, Bruns told Reuters on the sidelines of the Zhuhai airshow in southern China. "We're now at 100," said Bruns, the firm's most senior commercial airplane executive in China, whose aviation market is growing 10 percent a year.
"An order for 150 airplanes is a step. But we've competed with Airbus in this market for a long time..., we have the right products and strategy to get our fair share," added the 20-year Boeing veteran who was appointed to his current post in August.
Airbus, a unit of EADS, claimed 1,055 firm plane orders globally last year versus 1,002 for Boeing, both shattering previous records partly because carriers such as Air China Ltd and China Eastern Airlines Corp Ltd are expanding and retiring aged craft.
Boeing had looked set to surpass Airbus this year -- it had been outselling Airbus three-to-one, until the Chinese order, because of delays in Airbus' high-profile A380 superjumbo and the popularity of Boeing's own, next-generation 787. "Our philosophy is more point to point. We think that's the way passengers want to travel," Bruns said.
"I live in Seattle and fly to Beijing once a month. I don't want to fly through San Francisco, Narita, Vancouver. I want to get on the plane in Seattle and get off in Beijing." To that end, Boeing expects China will need 2,900 commercial airplanes over the next 20 years, 64 percent of which would be single-aisle jets, Bruns said. Five Chinese airlines would get their new Boeing 787 "Dreamliner" jets in June 2008 -- in time for the Beijing Olympics, Bruns added.
Comments
Comments are closed.