Advertisment Chinese airlines will spend more than $1 trillion USA on new aircraft over the next two decades as they seek to meet booming demand for air travel, according to a new forecast by Boeing.
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China will become the world’s first trillion-dollar aviation market as its expanding middle class takes to the skies in ever greater numbers, USA manufacturer Boeing predicted Tuesday, September 13.
Boeing released its annual China Current Market Outlook (CMO) today in Beijing, estimating the total value of those new airplanes at $1.025 trillion.
Of the 6,810 new aircraft it will need during the 2016-2035 period, 75% will be single-aisle planes with 90-230 seats, Boeing said.
Randy Tinseth, vice president of marketing with Boeing Commercial Airplanes, said as China moves towards a more consumer-based economy, the aviation industry will play a key role.
“As travel and transportation are key services, we expect to see passenger traffic grow 6.4 per cent annually in China over the next 20 years”, state-run Xinhua news agency quoted Tinseth as saying. Low-priced carriers and full-service airlines have been adding airplanes and expanding new point-to-point services to cater for both leisure and business travel demand from a rising middle class in China and throughout Asia. China’s narrowbody and widebody fleet account for about 18 per cent and 5 per cent respectively of the global figures, Boeing said. The forecast continues the shift from very large aircraft to small and medium wide-body planes. The more-optimistic outlook from Boeing, which a year ago announced a plan to build an aircraft-completion centre in China, comes after it delivered a record number of planes to China in 2015.
Today, Boeing jets are the mainstay of China’s air travel and cargo system.
Boeing said more than 50 percent of commercial jetliners operating in China are its planes.
In November past year, state-backed Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC) rolled out the C919, China’s first domestically developed narrow-body passenger plane that would compete with Boeing’s 737 and Airbus’ A320.
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China has become Boeing’s largest customer in the world.
