China · Donald Trump · Fortune Technology
Trump—and 500 jets—may be about to win it back
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The stateside player most likely to land a trophy coup is Boeing.
Key facts
- To get context on its importance, Boeing expects to exit 2025 delivering 52 737s, and they sell at a list price of around $100 million apiece, although those numbers, as always, would be heavily
- It also has a giant, almost $600 billion backlog for 6,100 planes, representing six to seven years of production
- In March 2019, China was the first nation to ground the MAX, acting in the aftermath of the fatal Ethiopian Airlines crash—and months after the earlier Lion Air disaster
- Since the blockage started seven years ago, Boeing’s sent over 100 planes to the nation that welcomed about that number of MAX in 2018 alone
Summary
President Trump has declared that the main focus of the China Summit is trade, specifically unveiling big transactions for signature U.S. enterprises that further swell their flow of exports, and Washington-Beijing accords that mark a defrosting of the icy standoff between the world’s two biggest economies. Two factors suggest that what might appear a rumor’s a done deal. Second, Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg is making the trip—as far as they know, he’s accompanying Trump alongside the other grandees on the Air Force One provided by the government of Qatar (which is, by the way, a custom version of the Boeing 787). Boeing could indeed soon be taking a victory lap, argues Richard Safran, an analyst at Seaport Global Securities. “The Administration doesn’t effectively pre-announce a deal unless it’s a fait-accompli,” Safran told Fortune.
Both Boeing and Airbus forecast that China will rank as the world’s largest aircraft market by 2043. The European consortium even operates a facility in Tianjin that makes the a320, the leading competitor to the MAX.