Airbus signs record deal to sell 500 aircraft to India’s IndiGo

Airbus has secured the largest aircraft order in history after sealing a billion-dollar deal to sell 500 narrow-body aircraft to India’s IndiGo.

The deal for Airbus’ A320 family is the largest in terms of number of aircraft and has surpassed rival Air India’s order of 470 Airbus and Boeing planes placed in February. This is bigger than IndiGo’s current fleet of 300 aircraft.

The world’s biggest aircraft maker did not disclose financial details of the deal, which was announced by officials on the first day of the biennial Paris Air Show, which is meeting for the first time after a gap of four years amid rising passenger demand.

“No one has ever done an order of this magnitude,” said Peter Albers, chief executive of IndiGo.

IndiGo is already the world’s largest customer of the A320neo jet. The agreement takes the total number of Airbus aircraft to be ordered by the carrier to 1,330. Monday’s firm order for 500 jets will be delivered between 2030 and 2035. Albers said the company “expects to double in size between today and the end of the decade”.

He declined to disclose how the order for 500 would be broken down among Airbus’ various A320 models. The airline has not yet chosen its engine.

Established in 2006, IndiGo has grown to become India’s largest domestic airline by passenger numbers, with more than half the domestic market share – 56.8 per cent in March, the most recent official statistics Available.

Analysts say that the aviation market is going through a phase of constant boom and bust.

Rising incomes and a strong post-pandemic economic boom have fueled hopes for India’s aviation industry, one of the fastest growing in the world. The number of passengers for the first three months of this year has increased by 5.8 per cent to 37.5 million from the same quarter of 2019. official data,

Airbus said last week that it expected India, which remains the world’s fastest-growing market, to be the strongest growth in Asia, led by China. The company estimates that the global fleet in 2042 will more than double from the pre-Covid level of 22,880 units in early 2020 to 46,560 aircraft.

The agreement, said Christian Scheer, Airbus Chief Commercial Officer, “symbolises the huge potential that the Indian market represents”.

However, some analysts expressed concern over the size of the order placed.

“The heavy reliance on orders from Indian airlines is not as positive as you would think for the sector,” said Sash Tusa, analyst at Agency Partners.

“A lot of the underlying assumptions about traffic growth are based on winning back regional traffic from Gulf carriers that are already outnumbered and highly competitive.”

Separately, Airbus also confirmed on Monday that Saudi airline Flynas has placed an order for 30 more A320neo family aircraft.