If you have money and want to flaunt it, mansions, limousines and yachts are no longer enough. For the super rich of Asia, owning a private jet has become the ultimate status symbol.
Executive-jet makers aiming to woo Asia’s growing ranks of billionaires and multimillionaires were out in force at the Singapore Airshow, which drew to a close over the weekend.
Brazil’s Embraer had Jackie Chan’s (成龍) personal Legacy 650 jet — with a unique white, red and yellow livery inspired by a mythical Chinese dragon — flown to Singapore for the trade fair.
MASSIVE FOLLOWING
The Hong Kong-born martial arts movie star, who has a massive following in China, was appointed this month as the company’s first ever brand ambassador.
Chan’s 13-seat plane, which has a list price of US$31.5 million, was one of several executive aircraft put on display by exhibitors including Canada’s Bombardier and US-based Gulfstream Aerospace Corp.
“Asia-Pacific, as you all know, is a market that is growing very, very nicely,” Embraer president Ernest Edwards, whose company also makes commercial planes, said at the airshow.
Asia now has the world’s second-largest concentration of millionaires after the US, with China and India producing them at a dizzying rate, according to a study by Merrill Lynch Global Wealth Management and Capgemini.
ASSETS OF US$30 MILLION
Jet makers are catering to the so-called “ultra high net worth” individuals and families with investable assets of at least US$30 million.
Their number rose to 23,000 in Asia in 2010, the report said, while US business magazine Forbes estimates that China alone has close to 150 billionaires.
An entry-level Phenom 100 from Embraer starts at US$4.055 million — a trifling sum, relatively speaking, for the target customer.
Embraer expects that between US$40 billion and US$48 billion worth of executive jets will be sold in Asia in the next 10 years — half of them in China.
40 OPERATING IN REGION
The company delivered its first executive jet in Asia to an unidentified customer in 2004 and now has 40 of them in operation in the region.
Not to be outdone, Gulfstream has opened a sales office in Beijing and set up a joint venture to operate a business jet service center in the Chinese capital’s international airport.
It will thus be the first private jet company to offer maintenance, repair and overhaul services for its customers in China, said Mark Burns, president of Gulfstream Product Support.
“In the long run, we see this expansion of our service capability as essential to maintaining our No. 1 position in the Chinese market in terms of market share and reputation,” he said.
Gulfstream said almost half of its orders in the third quarter of last year came from the Asia-Pacific region, and more than 40 of its planes are now being used in China.
Most recently, Gulfstream received a firm order for 20 jets from China’s Minsheng Leasing firm in October last year.
JOSTLING FOR THE PIE
Jostling for a piece of the Chinese pie is Hong Kong-based Sino Jet, a specialist business aviation firm started in May last year by Chinese businesswoman Jenny Lau, a former private banker.
Lau’s company, hired by superstar Chan to take care of his jet, offers a variety of services to its clients ranging from plane maintenance and sourcing of air crew to flight scheduling and inflight meals.
“I do believe this is a booming industry in China. With cultural advantage and language advantage, I have the absolute advantages of starting this business,” Lau said.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
The US Department of Commerce last week ordered multiple chip equipment companies to halt shipments of certain tools to China’s second-largest chipmaker, Hua Hong Semiconductor Ltd (華虹半導體), its latest action to slow the country’s development of advanced chips, two people familiar with the matter said. The department sent letters to at least a handful of companies informing them of restrictions on tools and other materials destined for two Hua Hong facilities US officials believe make China’s most sophisticated chips, the people said. Top US chip equipment companies Lam Research Corp, Applied Materials Inc and KLA Corp, each of which has significant
RSS