Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao was expected to announce an order for Airbus airliners worth about seven billion dollars in Paris on Monday, a day after a deal that could see some Airbus aircraft built in China.
News of the order was to come in a joint media conference by Wen and French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin scheduled for 12.30pm (11.30am GMT).
According to sources close to the negotiations, the order entails China buying over 100 A320 aircraft, the mid-range, 150-seat workhorse of the Airbus fleet.
Airbus gives the catalogue price of each A320 as $64,5-million. At that price, a seven-billion-dollar contact would cover about 108 of the planes, although discounts in the sector are common.
Airbus, a manufacturer 80% owned by the European Aeronautic, Defence and Space (EADS) company and 20% by Britain’s BAE Systems, is keen to obtain half the civil aviation market in China.
It currently has a one-third share, with United States rival Boeing — which secured a Chinese deal for 70 of its mid-range 737s last month — holding about 60%.
Airbus and Boeing forecast China will be buying between 1 800 and 2 700 planes over the next two decades to keep up with its surge in air travel that is expected to make the country the second-biggest customer for aircraft after the United States.
China, though, is not content to merely be on the buying end of the industry — it also wants major Western companies to set up shop on its soil, with their technology, and show Chinese workers how to make their complex products.
To that end, on Sunday Wen oversaw the signing of a memorandum of understanding between Airbus chief Gustav Humbert and the National Development and Reform Commission of China as he kicked off his European tour with a visit to Airbus’s headquarters in Toulouse, southwestern France.
The document called for ”a further upgrade of the cooperation” between China’s civil aviation industry and Airbus and included the ”possibility” of building an assembly plant for mid-range Airbus planes in China. So far, only France and Germany have such plants.
Humbert said that the memorandum set the scene for the expected plane order on Monday, saying that was ”the other part of this two-way street: to have more contracts, to have more aircraft flying in China”.
Wen, who is leading a 70-strong delegation including his foreign and culture ministers and several Chinese business leaders, was to see French President Jacques Chirac before meeting Villepin and announcing the Airbus deal.
Later on Monday, he was to meet representatives from the French employer’s federation MEDEF, and on Tuesday he was to visit the elite research university the Ecole Polytechnique south of the capital.
He was then to go to the southern city of Marseille to visit the Eurocopter helicopter factory, and to view the nearby site of the future experimental nuclear fusion reactor ITER, in which China is a partner.
Wen leaves France on Wednesday and was to continue his European tour with stopovers in Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Portugal. – Sapa-AFP