China has agreed to purchase 200 Boeing aircraft, with the deal potentially expanding to as many as 750 jets, U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters on Friday, adding that the planes would be equipped with engines from GE Aerospace.
The deal “includes approximately 200 planes and a promise of up to 750 if they do a good job,” Trump told reporters. More details on the deal, such as the type of jets and the delivery timeline, were not immediately available.
Boeing Eyes Return To China Market
The orders, if finalized, would mark Boeing’s first major Chinese deal in nearly a decade, after the U.S. planemaker was largely shut out of the world’s second-largest aviation market amid trade tensions between Beijing and Washington.
Boeing said the deal involved “an initial commitment” for 200 aircraft and that it expected more such commitments to follow after what it described as the initial tranche.
The planemaker traditionally uses the word “commitments” to refer to preliminary deals that are yet to be finalized, and are not posted on the company’s official order backlog.
Boeing said it now looked forward “to continually addressing China’s aircraft demand”.
Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg, and GE Aerospace chief Larry Culp were among the group of American executives who accompanied Trump to China in hopes of clinching deals or resolving business disputes.
“He (Xi) committed to 200 Boeings, big ones, 777s, and 737s, and a lot of big, big ones, big, beautiful Boeing planes,” Trump said in the interview aired on Friday evening.
For China, such a big order would secure capacity to keep growing its aviation market as production of its home-grown COMAC C919 narrow-body falls short of ambitious targets.
It would also help Boeing narrow the gap with rival Airbus, which has pulled far ahead in China in recent years.
An estimate from aviation intelligence and advisory firm IBA put the value of the 200-aircraft order at roughly $17 billion to $19 billion, assuming 80% of the mix is made up of MAX jets.
Order Size Below Expectations
Shares of the U.S. planemaker had dropped nearly 4% on Thursday after Trump told Fox News Channel China had agreed to buy 200 jets, well below analysts’ expectations. They were down about 2.6% on Friday, while GE Aerospace shares fell 2%.
Industry sources have said Boeing was originally in negotiations for at least 500 narrowbody jets tied to the Beijing summit with dozens of widebody jets and potentially as many as 200 to follow at a later date.
Trump said Xi would pay a return visit to Washington in September, implying it may become the focal point of the next tranche of potential plane orders.
(With inputs from Reuters)
