Business | Aviation
Boeing and Airbus take lion's share of $100b sales
The 10th Dubai Airshow concluded yesterday after a historic buying spree that accrued nearly $100 billion in sales and brought the world's attention to Middle East airlines.
- By Ivan Gale, Staff Reporter
- Published: 00:09 November 16, 2007
- The static display area teems with visitors trying to get up and close with the big birds.
- Image Credit: Hadrian Hernandez/Gulf News
Dubai: The 10th Dubai Airshow concluded yesterday after a historic buying spree that accrued nearly $100 billion in sales and brought the world's attention to Middle East airlines.
Airbus and Boeing, the world's two largest planemakers, walked away with the lion's share of the deals although business jet manufacturers also won lucrative contracts.
Airbus reportedly logged 297 orders of narrow and wide-bodied aircraft, and Boeing 155 during the five-day show held at Dubai Airport Expo.
Expectations before the show began varied wildly, but none could have predicted the 2007 showing would obliterate the previous sales record of $21 billion during the 2005 air show.
Delivery dates
Some planes ordered during the show are not due for delivery until 2018, prompting awe and disbelief from Boeing and Airbus executives at what has become an unprecedented buying display.
"We and Airbus are routinely selling airplanes for delivery out into the end of the next decade," said Scott Carson, Boeing's chief executive for commercial airplanes, in an interview. "Typically in our history we would sell airplanes for delivery five years forward on average. So when you are selling eight or nine years forward, we've never seen anything like this."
Louis Gallois, chief executive of EADS, the parent company of Airbus, said it could be tough to sustain the high volume of sales made in 2007.
"We know trees don't grow taller forever, and we also know aviation is a cyclical industry," he said.
Carson attributed the heavy orders to the limited number of production slots left for popular jetliner types from Boeing and Airbus, and also the economic boom that has built momentum in the Gulf.
"The primary thing that has driven this order cycle is global economic development," he said.
"This is a tremendous powerhouse of economic activity here in the Gulf region. If you live here you probably don't sense that the way that we do when you come from outside the region."
He added, "The changes in Dubai the last few years, the changes in Abu Dhabi, the changes in Doha are so obvious and so significant you can't miss the fact that this is rapidly becoming if not the economic centre, a very key economic centre in the world."
Longer-term developments also gathered apace during the air show as Dubai Aerospace Enterprise and Mubadala, two state-backed firms with ambitions to develop service-based aviation industries, signed numerous partnerships. Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, EADS and CAE are just some of the companies anticipating working relationships with the two UAE firms in the future.
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