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.
Sweeping policy changes under US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr are having a chilling effect on vaccine makers as anti-vaccine rhetoric has turned into concrete changes in inoculation schedules and recommendations, investors and executives said. The administration of US President Donald Trump has in the past year upended vaccine recommendations, with the country last month ending its longstanding guidance that all children receive inoculations against flu, hepatitis A and other diseases. The unprecedented changes have led to diminished vaccine usage, hurt the investment case for some biotechs, and created a drag that would likely dent revenues and
Macronix International Co (旺宏), the world’s biggest NOR flash memory supplier, yesterday said it would spend NT$22 billion (US$699.1 million) on capacity expansion this year to increase its production of mid-to-low-density memory chips as the world’s major memorychip suppliers are phasing out the market. The company said its planned capital expenditures are about 11 times higher than the NT$1.8 billion it spent on new facilities and equipment last year. A majority of this year’s outlay would be allocated to step up capacity of multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory chips, which are used in embedded multimedia cards (eMMC), a managed
CULPRITS: Factors that affected the slip included falling global crude oil prices, wait-and-see consumer attitudes due to US tariffs and a different Lunar New Year holiday schedule Taiwan’s retail sales ended a nine-year growth streak last year, slipping 0.2 percent from a year earlier as uncertainty over US tariff policies affected demand for durable goods, data released on Friday by the Ministry of Economic Affairs showed. Last year’s retail sales totaled NT$4.84 trillion (US$153.27 billion), down about NT$9.5 billion, or 0.2 percent, from 2024. Despite the decline, the figure was still the second-highest annual sales total on record. Ministry statistics department deputy head Chen Yu-fang (陳玉芳) said sales of cars, motorcycles and related products, which accounted for 17.4 percent of total retail rales last year, fell NT$68.1 billion, or
In the wake of strong global demand for AI applications, Taiwan’s export-oriented economy accelerated with the composite index of economic indicators flashing the first “red” light in December for one year, indicating the economy is in booming mode, the National Development Council (NDC) said yesterday. Moreover, the index of leading indicators, which gauges the potential state of the economy over the next six months, also moved higher in December amid growing optimism over the outlook, the NDC said. In December, the index of economic indicators rose one point from a month earlier to 38, at the lower end of the “red” light.
RSS