Rush of Airbus orders masks woes
Airbus completed 2017 doing what it does best: selling its bread-andbutter narrow-body aircraft.
The European manufacturer has just firmed up its biggest-ever order from Indigo Partners for 430
A320 aircraft – a contract that was previously announced – while also unveiling a new deal for 50 reengined versions of the same jet.
All told, the flurry of activity during the past two weeks has totalled 705 single-aisle plane orders with a sticker price of
US$81.5 billion (NZ$114b), pushing its full-year tally ahead of the figure at rival Boeing.
The orders for smaller jets also expose the flank that’s opened up at the other end of the manufacturer’s product line-up: widebody and ultra large jumbos that are becoming increasingly hard to sell.
The final burst of deals pushed Airbus’s net new orders for the year to just beyond 1000 planes, including 48 wide-bodies.
At Boeing, net orders for singleand twin-aisle models amounted to 844 planes as of December 19, and the US company hasn’t announced any sales contracts since then.
As if to hammer home the weakness of wide-body demand, Airbus also confirmed that an event scheduled for this week to mark the delivery to Qatar Airways of its first A350-1000 twinaisle plane will be delayed until early in the new year as the aircraft undergoes final preparations.
The move is the latest in a series of setbacks for the biggest
A350 version after United Airlines and Cathay Pacific Airways switched to the smaller -900 model.
Airbus shares have gained 33 per cent this year to value the manufacturer at €64.8 billion
(NZ$109b). Boeing’s shares surged
91 per cent in 2017 to a market value of US$176.7b.
The delay is also further evidence of Qatar Airways’ fickleness as a customer after past postponements and outright refusals by the airline to take deliveries of both narrow and wide-body jets, including a move earlier this year to scrap orders for four A350s.
The carrier’s order backlog has come into focus amid the Saudi Arabia-led isolation of its home country that has forced the airline to scrap and divert routes.
At the same time, a muchneeded follow-on order for Airbus A380s from Emirates, the biggest customer for that aircraft, remains elusive, despite signals by the manufacturer just a few weeks ago that a deal could materialise before the end of 2017.
Airbus, which was widely expected to sign the A380 contract at the Dubai Air Show in November, needs the order to bulk up its backlog for the double-decker aircraft and keep the loss-making programme alive.
While Boeing has had similar difficulties winning orders for its biggest wide-body jets, it has managed to sell the smallest version, the 787, and has committed to accelerating production rates for the aircraft.
The lull in orders for twin-aisle planes could ease with the growth of long-haul, low-cost operators including Norwegian Air Shuttle and Singapore Airline‘s Scoot unit, Jefferies International analyst Sandy Morris said.
‘‘You can be slightly curmudgeonly and say that the orders were almost all single aisle, but you have to believe that, if lowcost has the same effect on longhaul, the orders for wide-bodies could follow,’’ he said.
❚ Bloomberg