Boeing expecting a dull 2007 in terms of orders

2006 has been an amazing year for the airline industry. After a massive slump after the 911 attacks, the markets seem to have recovered well. And many airlines earlier in financial crisis ended up ordering big orders of new planes. The industry also benefited from the growing and newly emerging markets like China and India with big orders coming from these countries as well.

However, America based airline manufacturer Boeing has speculated that the market would see a dip in the coming year as most operators have booked their orders for the next couple of years already. The year has seen record-breaking orders being placed with both Boeing and Airbus.

Randy Baseler, Boeing’s vice president of marketing for commercial airplanes said in a statement: “The only thing you can do is look historically. The next year tends not to be as high. Every cycle is different. The tendency is that orders will be somewhat lower than this year.” He also added about their competition with Airbus: “We expect that when we start delivering the 787 in 2008, so several years out, we will probably have as many deliveries, or more deliveries than Airbus at that time.”

The competition between these two companies has seen huge discounts being offered to the end customer as both try hard to get the orders. Baseler said he expects price competition with Airbus to continue over the next few years. This forces them to keep the input costs low to maximize the profits from their deliveries of plans to the airline companies.