The agreement with a little-known German leasing company, Doric Asset Finance, was for 20 planes, and was valued at $8.1 billion at list prices. Doric was Airbus’s first new customer in nearly two years for its superjumbo plane, which typically seats around 525 passengers.
The order came on the opening day of the Paris Air Show amid a flurry of announcements of orders for wide-body planes made by Airbus’s American rival, Boeing, including a planned stretch model of its flagship 787 Dreamliner and a long-range version of its popular 777 jet.
Airbus has struggled to garner new orders for the A380, which entered commercial service in 2007, after a series of development snags. Airbus, which has sold 282 of the planes, has said it hopes to deliver 750 over the 25-year superjumbo program. Currently, nine airlines operate just over 100 of the planes.
The A380 has been a particularly tough sell to leasing companies because airlines have tended to seek extensive and costly customization of its interior to differentiate themselves from competitors. Such work can be an onerous proposition for lessors, which often roll a plane over to different airlines during its lifetime. Two years ago, International Lease Finance Corporation, one of the world’s largest aircraft lessors, dropped plans to buy 10 superjumbos as the global economic slowdown drove airlines to rein in seat capacity.
But Doric, which is based in Offenbach, near Frankfurt, said on Monday that it was talking with several potential customers for the A380 jets.
“We see how airlines that do not yet have the A380 are interested in it and approach us and ask questions, which shows us that there is pent-up demand for this aircraft,” said Mark Lapidus, Doric’s chief executive. He said he expected his company would easily place the planes with two or three airlines.
“If anything, we are perhaps under-ordering” the jets, he said.
Another leasing company, GE Capital Aviation Services, planned to order up to 10 models of a stretch version of Boeing’s 787, which the American manufacturer was expected to commit to building this week. The larger 787 is expected to seat 320 passengers, compared with the 210 to 290 seats in the Dreamliners currently in production.
Analysts said they were skeptical about a fundamental change in the market for planes with more than 400 seats, like the A380 and Boeing 747.
“Long term, the financial future for the A380 looks pretty weak,” said Saj Ahmad, chief analyst for StrategicAero Research in London. “It’s a very small niche market.”
Despite the dearth of recent A380 orders, “the basics haven’t changed,” said Christopher Emerson, Airbus’s senior vice president for marketing. He attributed the slower-than-expected uptake of A380s to bad timing, noting that the first deliveries came less than a year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which set off the global financial crisis and subsequent recession.
“Now that we are coming out of the downturn, you will start to see traffic growing faster,” Mr. Emerson said. “Now is the time for the A380 to do what it was designed to do: capture growth.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: June 17, 2013
An earlier version of this article inaccurately characterized an order for Airbus’s A380 jets. Doric Asset Finance is Airbus’s first new customer in nearly two years for its superjumbo plane, it is not its first customer for the jet.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/18/business/global/big-jets-may-be-back-in-demand-with-economy.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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