Airbus Commercial CEO Weighs In On COMAC Competitiveness

Airbus and Boeing have different views on when, or whether, Chinese manufacturer COMAC will become a competitive threat.

At last year’s Paris Airshow, then-Boeing Commercial Airplanes CEO Stan Deal said he did not believe COMAC would become a viable competitor for at least the next 10 years.

However, Airbus Commercial CEO Christian Scherer believes COMAC is already a serious competitor. Speaking at a pre-Farnborough Airshow briefing in London on Sunday, he said the state-owned Chinese company was already making inroads into the market, albeit in a limited way.

“It’s not when, or if, they’re a competitor so far; they’re very much influential in the PRC [People’s Republic of China] and perhaps in the surrounding areas and countries,” he said.

“There’s significant sustained demand not only in China … for the cake to be split up between all the contenders,” he added.

“COMAC has brought an aircraft to market: it sells. In very, very small quantities, but that’s where you start. But COMAC hasn’t really brought anything new, of differentiating substance, to the market, compared to the ‘reference product’ that I would say is the Airbus A320/321 [or] from what Airbus was 50 years ago.”

The original A320 introduced fly-by-wire and sidesticks to the commercial airliner market.

“Trying to develop a technological sovereignty here in Europe, Airbus didn’t imitate a product already in the market; it brought something new, and that accelerated our [market] penetration.”

COMAC’s latest product, the C919 “is effectively an A320neo,” Scherer said. It has the same technological features as the European aircraft, he said, rather than anything revolutionary. “There’s no differentiation; there’s no new value being brought to the market.”

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