Last week was a good week for EAD’s subsidiary Airbus at the Farnborough Air Show. The company announced over $40 billion worth of orders, which consisted of 247 aircraft, primarily from European and Asian carriers. The two largest orders were from two Middle Eastern Carriers, DAE Capital (aircraft leasing for Dubai Aerospace) and Etihad Airways. DAE ordered a total of 100 aircraft, worth about $12.6 billion, for 30 A350-900s and 70 A320s. Etihad’s order consisted of 55 aircraft, including 25 A350 XWBs, 10 A380s, and 20 A320s. Other carriers to join the party included: Aeroflot (5 A321s), Asiana (30 A350 XWBs), Aviation Capital Group (23 Airbus A32X), Saudia (8 A330-300s), Synergy Aerospace (10 A350-800s), and Tunisair (10 A320s, 3 A330-200s & 3 A350-800s). The aircraft manufacturer also received commitments from Qatar Airways, Alis, and AerCap. That’s quite a sum of aircraft when you look at it. To me, it looks like the A350 is growing with primary Airbus users, but the 787 is still far beyond, orders wise.
Now on to Boeing. Only one order was announced by Boeing at the air show, and that was Air China’s purchase of $6.3 billion worth of aircraft. The order consists of 15 777-300ERs and 30 737-800s. You might be thinking, that’s it? I’m not very shocked. In past years, Boeing does not always publically announce it’s deals with carriers as boldly as Airbus does. Yet, I’m not surprised, since Airbus has been catching up to Boeing, in the past few years, for orders.
When it comes down to it, Boeing had more orders coming in to the Air Show with 542 (July 15th last reported). Airbus had 487 (June 30th last reported) coming in to the Air Show. If you add in the orders from this airshow, Airbus has 743 orders and Boeing has 587. So far, Airbus is ahead of Boeing by 156 orders. Farnborough was a huge leap for Airbus and we’ll have to wait and see how this plays out for them in Q3 and Q4.
Image: farnborough.com
