AirAsia orders record 200 Airbus A320neo jets worth $18.2 billion

Manila Bulletin
June 25, 2011

 PARIS, June 24 (AFP) – Malaysian airline AirAsia ordered a record 200 medium-haul Airbus A320neo passenger jets on Thursday, a deal with a catalogue price of $18.2 billion (12.7 billion euros), both firms announced at the Paris air show.

''It is the largest single order for Airbus in terms of numbers of aircraft,'' Airbus chairman Thomas Enders told reporters at the Le Bourget aerodrome as he stood next to AirAsia boss Tony Fernandes.

The order makes the Malaysian low-cost pioneer Airbus' biggest customer, with a total of 375 planes on order from the France-based planemaker and 89 A320s already in service.

Fernandes said this week that AirAsia had already placed an order for 175 A320s which will be fully delivered by 2015 but to meet its expansion plans in Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam it needed another 200 aircraft.

AirAsia's current 93-strong fleet serves about 160 routes in Asia, making over 520 flights daily from hubs in Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia.

Fernandes had said earlier that this would be a ''big day'' for his company at the trade show at the Le Bourget aerodrome north of Paris, as rumors spread he was about to announce a record plane purchase.

''Look where I am. Big day for AirAsia,'' he announced on Twitter, alongside a link to a picture of the Eiffel Tower.

European defense group EADS, Airbus' parent company, rose nearly 2.0 percent after news of the AirAsia order.

Airbus was due to give a press conference later Thursday, the last trade day of the show before the doors are thrown open to the public on Friday, to summarize a week in which it has won billions of dollars in orders.

The A320neo is an upgraded and more fuel-efficient variant of the single-aisle workhorse A320, and it has emerged as the star of the Paris air show with hundreds of orders.

The medium-haul market is the most important of the industry and will likely account for nearly half of all commercial plane sales by value over the next 20 years, according to Airbus rival Boeing, which makes the rival 737 series.

Earlier, Airbus notched an order for 180 aircraft from Indian low-cost carrier IndiGo, the biggest single order a company has received in terms of planes.