Indian airlines need more than 850 planes

MUMBAI: India’s airlines have ordered about 850 planes valued at about $85 billion in recent years. SpiceJet Ltd., a budget carrier, says that is still not enough to meet demand.

SpiceJet, which last month ordered as many as 205 Boeing Co. jets worth $22 billion, is being rather conservative with its purchases, the carrier’s chairman Ajay Singh told Rishaad Salamat in a Bloomberg Television interview in Singapore on Wednesday. Demand will surge with more Indians starting to fly, fueled by economic growth in smaller towns, he said.

800 planes in 10 years

“With all the orders that all the Indian airlines have placed, counting for replacements, we will have 800 planes in 10 years from now,” Singh said. “That is not a lot of planes.

wThat is the same number of planes that Southwest Airlines has today.”

India — the world’s fastest growing major aviation market — is among battlegrounds in emerging markets for planemakers like Boeing and Airbus Group SE, as a rising middle class flies for the first time.

Poor infrastructure

The potential has made Singapore Airlines Ltd. and AirAsia Bhd. set up local units that are grappling with poor infrastructure, cutthroat fare wars and taxes that make jet fuel the costliest in Asia.

“We have to keep on developing the infrastructure,” Singh said. “A lot of the growth in India is not happening in Mumbai and Delhi, it’s happening in tier-2, tier-3 towns.”

Remote locations

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has offered to fund some of the airlines’ losses and to subsidise landing and parking charges if they fly to remote parts of the country as part of a recent policy. Modi has also vowed to cap airfares to stimulate demand in unserved airports, which constitute about 80 per cent of the country’s total airports and airstrips.

SpiceJet, which was forced to shut down briefly in 2014 after running out of money, has many options to finance its plane orders, said Singh, an original cofounder who returned to run the carrier again.

Potential funding

Those include potential funding by the Export-Import Bank of the United States as well as sale-andleaseback arrangements, he said.

IndiGo, India’s biggest airline, has ordered 430 Airbus A320neo jets on top of a previous order for 100 planes, making it the model’s biggest customer in the world. Go Airlines India Pvt. has ordered 144 of the same model, while Vistara, a joint venture between Tata Sons Ltd. and Singapore Airlines, said it is looking to order narrow- and wide-body planes.