The CIS sky is worth 70 billion

Boeing published market forecast

The American aircraft manufacturing corporation Boeing has released its annual forecast for the development of the global air transportation market . In Moscow yesterday it was presented to the public by Randy Tinseth, vice president of marketing for Boeing's civil aircraft division. According to Mr. Tinseth and the company’s specialists, the global industry is expecting stable growth and a radical renewal of the aircraft fleet. And the market of Russia and other CIS countries, even against this background, will stand out with particularly high growth rates. True, post-Soviet countries will satisfy their needs for aircraft, according to Boeing experts, not with the help of the local aircraft industry, but at the expense of American and Western European aircraft . That is why Boeing considers Russia a very promising geographic market for itself.

Having made the reservation that it is very difficult to predict the socio-economic development of any country 20 years in advance and that the forecast for the aviation market will still be continuously updated in each subsequent annual report, Mr. Tinseth provided the following indicative figures. Today, in Russia and other CIS countries, 21 airlines operate a total of 136 aircraft manufactured by the American corporation. According to Boeing experts, in the period from 2007 to 2026, CIS companies will purchase 1,060 aircraft. At the same time, the total number of their air fleet will not increase that much. Today there are approximately 1,400 airliners operating in the region, and by the end of the twentieth century there will be 1,670. The bulk of newly acquired aircraft will be used to replace those that are being written off due to physical or moral obsolescence. Moreover, if in the category of regional and medium-haul aircraft Russia has at least a theoretical opportunity to offer replacement of retired equipment with a more advanced domestic product (the SSJ-100 and Tu-334 being developed, as well as those already launched into the Tu-204/214 series), then in the class It has none of its own wide-body long-range aircraft except the Il-96. The Boeing report notes this aircraft as one of the possible fleet renewal options, but emphasizes that it will have to compete for the budgets of purchasing airlines with several Western aircraft of similar or larger dimensions, including the promising Boeing 787 and Airbus 350 families. These “opponents” actually belong to a different generation of commercial airliners.

In general, Boeing estimates the cost of more than a thousand aircraft that will be purchased by CIS companies until 2026 at $70 billion. This is not much compared to the total global airliner market for the same period - 28,600 aircraft with a total value of 2.5 trillion However, Mr. Tinseth stressed yesterday the exceptional importance of the Russian and CIS market for his company, explaining that the published forecasts are “conservative.” But Boeing does not rule out that in reality the demand for modern aircraft in this part of the world will be even higher.

Mikhail KUKUSHKIN