| Senior official: Crisis not dampening Airbus China assembly target |
| Wednesday,April 22,2009 Posted: 05:56 BJT(2156 GMT) |
| From:xinhua Article type:Redistributed |
Leading world aircraft producer Airbus will cut monthly global production of the A320 in October but its assembly target in China won't change, a senior company official said Tuesday. Due to the global downturn, Airbus will cut the monthly production of the A320 passenger plane from 36 to 34, but its target of assembling 11 planes this year in China will not change, Marc Bertiaux, vice president of the Airbus Cooperation and Partnership with China, told Xinhua. By the end of 2011, the Airbus final assembly line in north China's Tianjin City will produce four A320s a month, mainly for domestic carriers, he said. Since China was not as badly affected as some other countries by the financial crisis, the country's economic growth had maintained sound momentum, he said. "The stable and fast economic growth of China has also strengthened our confidence to stabilize our aircraft production." The Tianjin assembly line mostly produces A320s and is the only final assembly line of the company outside Europe. The first A320 aircraft assembled on the Tianjin line would start trial flights next month and is expected to be delivered in June to Dragon Aviation Leasing, a China-based aircraft leasing firm, who will lease the jetliner to the domestic Sichuan Airlines. Sichuan Airlines was the first Chinese carrier to introduce theA320 aircraft to China in 1995. Bertiaux also said by 2010, Airbus expects to have bought up to200 million U.S. dollars worth of aircraft composite materials and components from China, about triple the value of 70 million U.S. dollars in 2007. As cooperation between Airbus and China's aerospace industry deepens, such purchases could reach 450 million U.S. dollars in 2015, he said. Bertiaux attributed the increasing purchases to the company's A350 XWB packages, from which China would participate in 5 percent of the work of component design and manufacturing. According to figures from Airbus, more than 5,600 Airbus aircraft are being flown by more than 300 air carriers globally. Half of those planes include China-made components. Six Chinese aeronautics companies in Xi'an, Shenyang and Chengdu are producing Airbus components including rear doors, wing boxes and brakes. The interview with Bertiaux was conducted during the 2009 China Tianjin International Business Convention for Aerospace Industries, which runs from Tuesday to Thursday. Bernard Accoyer, president of the French National Assembly, called for more French companies to invest in China's aerospace industries when he visited the fair. He cited the Airbus-China relationship as a successful example. The convention attracted about 350 domestic and foreign companies. |
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