Airbus is courting China with its first wide-body jet facility outside Europe, positioning the company to chase billions of dollars in potential orders from an aviation market that's set to become the world's biggest within a decade.
Last week, Chief Operating Officer Fabrice Bregier inaugurated the $200 million completion center in Tianjin, a site designed to give finishing touches such as painting and cabin installation to A330 aircraft. The city, near Beijing, is already home to an assembly plant that produces single-aisle A319s and A320s.
"There's a direct connection between your investment, your capabilities to demonstrate that you care about the Chinese industry and at the same time your market access," Bregier told Tom Mackenzie on Bloomberg Television in Tianjin. To prove his point, he said the planemaker's market share has risen from 20 percent to almost 50 percent since its investment in the narrow-body assembly plant.
In a race to earn Chinese goodwill, Airbus and Boeing are moving parts of their manufacturing and supply chains to a country the U.S. company estimates will need $1.1 trillion of aircraft over two decades and where the government still makes key buying decisions. For China, which has its own aviation ambitions, the A330 center is a coup of sorts in its chase to build its own commercial planes.
The Toulouse, France-based maker may even look at adding A350s to its China plan in the future, Bregier said. As traffic surges, the country needs more wide-body aircraft, he said, pitching for the A380 that hasn't found much demand beyond the five flying in China.
SundayMonday Business on 09/24/2017