SHANDONG Airlines said Friday it planned to buy 15 Boeing passenger planes worth up to US$1.2 billion amid fast-growing demand for air travel in the increasingly prosperous country.
The catalogue price of each Boeing 737-800 aircraft is between US$75 million and US$80 million but the U.S. aerospace giant is offering unspecified price concessions, the airline told the Shenzhen Stock Exchange.
The 15 planes will be delivered between 2014 and 2015, it said.
Boeing said in November that it expected China s civil aircraft fleet to more than triple over the next 20 years, with 5,180 planes by 2029 compared with 1,570 last year.
Chinese airlines will need 4,330 new jets valued at US$480 billion over the next two decades, compared with global demand of 30,900 units during the period, said Boeing s vice president of marketing, Randy Tinseth.
The announcement of the deal comes weeks ahead of President Hu Jintao s visit to the United States in January and amid soaring demand for air travel in the world s most populous country of 1.3 billion people.
Airline traffic in China is expected to exceed 700 million passengers a year by 2020, and double that by 2030, Chinese-language media has reported, quoting the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC).
(SD-Agencies)
