France’s Safran SA said it won a US$5 billion contract to supply engines for China’s first narrowbody aircraft and will consider building a “final assembly line” in the country with its partner General Electric Co.
The deal, which was to be signed yesterday, may be worth three times that amount over 30 years including maintenance contracts, Safran chief executive officer Jean-Paul Herteman told reporters in Beijing yesterday.
Commercial Aircraft Corp of China (Comac, 中國商飛) is planning the single-aisle C919, about the same size as a Boeing Co 737 or Airbus SAS A320, to enter service in 2016. CFM International, the GE and Safran venture, will supply its Leap-X engine for the project, said the people, who declined to be identified.
“The outlook for the C919 remains uncertain and the headwinds it faces are great, but the market just within China is potentially large,” said Douglas Runte, a managing director at Piper Jaffray & Co in New York.
Safran shares rose as much as 0.31 euros (US$0.45), or 3.4 percent, to 13.35 euros, changing hands up 2.3 percent at 13.2 euros as of 9:24am in Paris.
China plans to complete the construction of an assembly plant to make C919 planes in Shanghai by 2012, part of plans to create an aircraft manufacturing industry in the nation’s financial center.
China is developing passenger aircraft to compete with Airbus and Boeing, aiming to gain from the growth in the world’s second-largest aviation market.
China needs to add 3,796 passenger planes in the 20 years through 2028, said a forecast by Aviation Industry Corp of China, the nation’s largest aerospace company.
The Leap-X is designed to reduce fuel consumption by 16 percent from the current model, which powers the two Airbus SAS and Boeing Co planes.
Narrowbody jetliners comprise more than 60 percent of all commercial aircraft. Manufacturers have estimated the market for new engines as replacements or on newly designed single-aisle aircraft at US$30 billion to US$50 billion. CFM’s win comes as Airbus and Boeing consider offering the more efficient engines on existing narrowbody aircraft and push plans for new planes beyond 2020.
As of September, Boeing and Airbus combined had delivered more than 9,000 narrowbody planes since the first Boeing 737 hit the market in 1967, with some 4,500 orders still pending.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy