Airbus SE has secured two major orders from the flagship carriers of Japan and South Korea, giving the European manufacturer a strategic win in markets that have traditionally leaned toward archrival Boeing Co.
Japan Airlines Co said it is buying 21 Airbus 350-900 as well as 11 A321neos, breaking Boeing’s exclusive hold as the sole single-aisle jet supplier for the carrier. Boeing brought home a smaller deal, for 10 Boeing 787 wide-body jets.
Two hours later, Korean Air Lines Co announced the purchase of 33 Airbus A350 jets in a winner-takes-all contest that left Boeing empty-handed.
Photo: AFP
The commercial successes would help Airbus deepen relations with two carriers that for decades built the bulk of their fleets around the US manufacturer.
Boeing has been in crisis for several months following a near-catastrophic accident on a 737 Max 9 model in early January. Nevertheless, the carrier has managed to log several big orders since then, and loyal carriers such as Ryanair Holdings PLC have pledged their support to the US company as it seeks to improve its manufacturing processes.
This year is shaping up to be buoyant for wide-body aircraft orders, with Qatar Airways QCSC seeking to purchase as many as 150 twin-aisle jets. Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd (國泰航空) in Hong Kong is also considering a sizeable deal involving dozens of mid-sized wide-body jets. There are also big narrow-body orders on the horizon with Cebu Air Inc looking to close out an order for as many as 150 planes.
Korean Air mostly ordered the larger variant of Airbus’ A350 wide-body model. Of the almost 160 planes in Korean Air’s fleet, 65 percent are from Boeing. The carrier still has about 60 Boeing jets on backlog and about 75 with Airbus after its latest order announcement.
Japan Airlines has about 155 Boeing jets in its fleet with just 17 Airbus jets, the company’s latest financial presentation showed.
Demand for larger jets and bulk buying, bullish bets on future travel growth and strains on plane makers’ ability to meet demand for single-aisle aircraft this decade is fueling a surge in wide-body orders over the past 12 months.
Last year saw a series of bumper orders including an order for 90 777X jets from Emirates Airline and 50 from United Airlines Holdings Inc for the 787-9.
Airbus scored big with 70 wide-body jets out of 220 ordered by Turkish Airlines among other deals. Thai Airways International PCL unveiled an order for 45 787 Dreamliners at the Singapore Airshow last month, having agreed on the deal in December last year.
Both plane makers anticipate that the Asia-Pacific region would account for 40 percent of global air traffic in two decades, up from one-third, according to their long-term projections.
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts
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
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],”
Huawei Technologies Co’s (華為) latest smartphones carry a version of the advanced made-in-China processor it revealed last year, results from an independent analysis showed. This underscored the Chinese company’s ability to sustain production of the controversial chip. The Pura 70 series unveiled last week sports the Kirin 9010 processor, research firm TechInsights found during a teardown of the device. This is a newer version of the Kirin 9000s, made by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) for the Mate 60 Pro, which had alarmed officials in Washington who thought a 7-nanometer chip was beyond China’s capabilities. Huawei has enjoyed a resurgence since