China's airlines will buy 1,900 jets over the next 20 years as the country becomes the second largest aviation market in the world, Boeing Corp said yesterday.
This represented an average annual growth of 7.6 percent compared with a worldwide average of just 4.9 percent, the company said in its 2002 Current Market Outlook, China Focus.
The US aviation giant said the boom would be driven by a range of factors including service improvements, international trade and lower airfares, as well as economic growth.
PHOTO: REUTERS
But a senior official at the General Administration of Civil Aviation of China disagreed with the figure, saying Asia's fastest growing economy will need 1,250 planes by 2010, which would be twice what the country had last year, Gao Hongfeng, vice minister at the country's aviation regulator, said yesterday at an Airshow China conference in Zhuhai.
Passenger and cargo traffic rose by 13.5 percent and 11.5 percent respectively in the first nine months of the year from the year-earlier period, Gao said. China's air traffic is expected to grow at an average rate of 10 percent a year between 2001 and 2010, Gao said.
Aircraft makers want to tap China's potential as orders elsewhere dried up in the aftermath of last year's terrorist attacks, the global economic slowdown and the threat of war in Iraq. The world's largest aircraft makers expect Chinese carriers to buy between 1,600 and 1,900 passenger aircraft worth about US$144 billion by 2020.
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