EADS unit Airbus has won an order worth more than 2 billion euros ($2.5 billion) to deliver A330 planes to Russian airline Aeroflot, a source familiar with the deal said Thursday.
"Aeroflot has made the order already a few days ago," the source said. EADS would not comment, while Aeroflot was not available for comment.
Aeroflot chief executive Vitaly Savelyev had already said last weekend that the company expected to acquire 22 Boeing Dreamliners and 22 Airbus A350s by 2016 in a move to expand its fleet.
Savelyev drew a rebuke from Putin, who said Aeroflot should focus on purchasing Russian-made planes.
Airbus said Wednesday that it might expand its partnership in Russia by jointly developing a future aircraft, not the 150-seat jet now planned by Irkut.
It will take time to move beyond an existing alliance in Russia that creates freighters from A320 single-aisle passenger planes, Airbus chief executive Tom Enders said. Irkut will develop the MC-21 on its own, Enders said.
“We have always said this is a long-haul strategy,” he said. “We start small, then we go to bigger projects like the freighter conversion. And then maybe, some day, we will be able to also develop aircraft together.”
Irkut has said it intends to develop a 150-seater that would challenge Airbus’s own single-aisle A320 as well as Boeing’s 737 series. The plane is in a preliminary design phase and management will give further details about planned development at the Farnborough International Airshow next week.
“Russian colleagues have already decided on the MC-21,” Enders said. “I think the development has started. We don’t see a replacement of our very successful single-aisle A320 family for the next 15 years or so.”
Enders said Airbus, based in Toulouse, France, is seeing signs of a nascent recovery in the commercial aircraft business following the recession in 2009.
“We saw signs of it at the Berlin air show” in June, he said, and he is “cautiously optimistic” that the recovery will be evident at Farnborough.
(Reuters, Bloomberg, MT)
Vneshekonombank does not plan on handing its 5 percent stake in EADS, the parent company of Airbus, to the state-run United Aircraft Corporation, VEB president Vladimir Dmitriyev said Wednesday.
"We're not holding any talks [on a handover]. We bought it, why should we have to hand it over to someone?" Dmitriyev said, Interfax reported.
The state development bank would have to take a loss if it sold the EADS stake now, he said, adding that the shares were worth only 70 percent of VEB's purchase price.
State-run VTB bought up the stake in 2006 as EADS's shares plummeted, selling them to VEB in December of that year for 995 million euros ($1.27 billion).
Germany and France raised the purchase with then-President Vladimir Putin over concerns that the Russian aviation industry was attempting to "destroy the company from within," Putin said at the time.
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