A new rivalry between the world’s biggest planemakers is heating up in Indonesia after a record deal for Airbus SAS in a market with huge potential that until now has been a “fortress” for Boeing Co.
The European company in the past consistently lost contracts to its US rival in Southeast Asia’s top economy, but budget carrier Lion Air’s 18.4 billion euro (US$23.8 billion) order last week for 234 medium-haul Airbus jets may be a game-changer in the feud for market share.
“This is a major deal for Airbus because, generally, Indonesia has been a fortress for Boeing,” Ravi Madavaram, an aerospace analyst for Frost & Sullivan in Kuala Lumpur, told reproters.
“I think the moment Airbus comes into the picture, more and more low-cost carriers will want an Airbus A320. Then it becomes challenging for Boeing to catch up,” Madavaram added.
Lion Air’s A320 deal with Airbus announced in Paris on Monday last week was the most valuable commercial order booked in history. The second-biggest was also made by Lion Air in 2011, in a US$22.4 billion order for 230 Boeing jets.
Boeing last year overtook Airbus as the world’s biggest planemaker in terms of aircraft delivered for the first time in 10 years.
“Lion Air was in fact one of the few airlines in the region that had never ordered an aircraft from Airbus. But we never gave up,” Jean-Francois Laval, executive vice president of sales for Airbus Asia, told reporters.
“We have not exactly been absent from Indonesia. The new order from Lion Air will significantly increase our presence in the important Indonesian market,” he added.
However, Boeing says the Airbus deal has not ruffled its feathers as it works to deliver more than 300 jets ordered from Lion Air and its offshoot carriers.
“Lion Air has ambitious growth plans and no one airplane manufacturer can meet its needs,” Boeing spokesman Ken Morton told reporters.
While slow growth in Western economies is hitting the aviation industry, Asian countries are booming with an emerging middle class keen to take to the air.
Indonesians are increasingly relying on air travel to link the archipelago of 17,000-odd islands, with up to 900 new planes set to be delivered to Indonesia in the next decade, according to the government.
The potential is huge — only 6 percent of Indonesians have traveled by air, according to officials, in a nation of 240 million people that has consistently clocked annual economic growth above 6 percent.
By 2021, about 180 million passengers are expected to fly domestically in Indonesia, triple the 2011 number, the CAPA Centre for Aviation said.
Lion Air, Indonesia’s biggest private carrier, has ordered more than 460 planes in just 16 months, a dramatic expansion that has raised doubts about how it will find the financing, pilots and landing slots.
The airline is banned from the EU and US over safety concerns. However, it says it plans to broaden its regional horizons, and observers think it wants to take on AirAsia.
It now operates 92 planes — all Boeings except for one older McDonnell Douglas — to 72 destinations, mostly in Indonesia.
The furthest it flies is to Saudi Arabia, a route packed with domestic workers and construction laborers.
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
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained