Airbus expects Russia to become the world’s sixth largest market for new passenger planes in the next 20 years, nearly doubling its current passenger fleet, the company said Tuesday.
Russia’s annual growth in passenger volume of 5.6 percent is outpacing global growth of 4.7 percent, and the company estimates that the country will need more than 1,000 planes over 20 years, up from 535 in 2008, costing over $90 billion.
An estimated 830 of those aircraft will be narrow-aisle planes like bestseller A320, Airbus said in a presentation. “We plan to deliver at least half of all planes during that period,” said Andreas Kramer, Airbus vice president for sales and marketing in Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States.
Including other members of the CIS, the 20-year forecast sees sales of 1,440 planes for $123 billion dollars, the presentation said. In the summer, Boeing predicted demand for 1,570 planes for $90 billion dollars.
Russian airlines have increasingly switched to foreign made planes with higher fuel efficiency. Federal Air Transportation Agency head Gennady Kurzenkov said Monday that in 2009, foreign-made planes carried 73 percent of passenger volume on international flights, and 60 percent on domestic flights, while 31 percent of Russian-made planes in the fleet were not in operation. Passenger volume for the first 10 months of the year fell by about 12 percent, according to official figures.
A total of 140 Airbus planes are currently used by seven Russian airlines, with 80 more ordered, primarily by Aeroflot, S7, Vladivostok Avia and Ural Airlines, Kramer said.
The global duopoly of Airbus and Boeing “will not go on forever,” Kramer said, since countries like Brazil and Russia are increasingly supporting domestic aircraft makers.