Airbus shares in green after hours: Airbus has once again left Boeing behind in 2023

Despite tense supply chains, the European manufacturer handed over 735 commercial aircraft to its customers, as it announced on Thursday evening in Toulouse. That was over 200 more than Boeing and 15 more than Airbus boss Guillaume Faury had targeted. Thanks to the recovery of air traffic from the Corona crisis, the DAX group also received orders for more than 2,000 jets – setting an industry record. The order backlog also reached a record high of almost 8,600 aircraft.

Last year, Airbus cut its delivery target twice due to a shortage of components such as seats and engines and ultimately only delivered 661 jets. Faury had therefore planned comparatively cautiously for 2023. He originally wanted to reach the target of 720 machines by 2022.

The manager explained that things went better this time because of the greater flexibility and performance of Airbus and its suppliers. However, the delivery record of 863 machines from the pre-Corona year 2019 is still a long way away. After Airbus and Boeing significantly reduced their aircraft production during the Corona crisis, they would now like to ramp it up again more quickly. However, bottlenecks among suppliers and a lack of workers in parts of the industry make it difficult for them.

In any case, there is no shortage of orders. Last year alone, Airbus collected orders for 2,319 new passenger and cargo jets. After deducting cancellations, there were 2,094 items, well more than twice as many as the year before. Neither Airbus nor its only relevant rival Boeing had ever booked so many orders in one year before.

“We originally assumed that air traffic would recover sometime between 2023 and 2025,” said Christian Scherer, recently head of the Airbus commercial aircraft division. However, in addition to the need for medium-haul jets, demand for wide-body aircraft for long-haul flights has also returned much earlier than expected.

Airbus’ order backlog grew from 7,239 to 8,598 airliners within a year. The increase corresponds to almost double annual production. Competitor Boeing received 1,314 net new orders last year and still had 6,216 jet orders in stock at the turn of the year. The Airbus medium-haul jets from the A320neo family in particular are in such high demand that production is fully booked for years to come. Last year, almost 80 percent of the Airbus aircraft delivered and ordered were from this model series. There were also 96 wide-body jets, including 64 A350s and 32 A330neos, as well as 68 examples of the smallest Airbus model, the A220.

In order to satisfy the strong demand for the A320neo jets, CEO Faury wants to expand production of the series from around 50 to 75 machines per month by 2026. That’s around one and a half times as many as Boeing is aiming for by then for its competing model, the 737 Max. To achieve this, the Europeans are building new production lines in the USA and China. An additional line in Toulouse is already in operation.

The lion’s share of orders are now for the long version A321neo, which was only manufactured in Hamburg in the past and will be built at all locations in the future. A variant of the jet is the A321XLR (Extra Long Range): According to current plans, Airbus wants to deliver this smallest long-haul jet in the world for the first time by mid-2024 at the latest.

Even before the corona pandemic in 2019, the European manufacturer had replaced its competitor Boeing as the largest aircraft manufacturer in the world. The US company found itself in the worst crisis in its history after the crash of two medium-haul jets from the 737 Max series. Initially, the aircraft type was neither allowed to take off nor be delivered anywhere in the world for more than a year and a half. After it received approval again after extensive technical improvements during the pandemic, production errors and other defects in this and other models set the manufacturer back further.

Since last weekend, more than 170 medium-haul jets of the Boeing 737 Max 9 version have not been allowed to take off worldwide after a fuselage part of an Alaska Airlines flight came out in flight. The passengers narrowly escaped disaster. Now all aircraft must be checked that, like the Alaska Airlines plane, has an unneeded emergency exit closed with a solid part of the fuselage.

The Airbus share was temporarily up 0.32 percent at 144.68 euros in after-hours trading on Tradegate.

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TOULOUSE (dpa-AFX)

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