On the final business day of the Paris Air Show, Boeing emerged the clear winner over rival Airbus thanks largely to sales of the 737 MAX.
Randy Tinseth, Boeing vice president for marketing, said in a phone interview on Thursday from Paris that although the 737 MAX 10, successfully launched in Paris, was "clearly the star of the show," additional Boeing widebody jet sales could also help buoy production rates in Everett, Wash., a city in the Seattle area, where Boeing has a major presence.
Counting new firm orders and commitments, Boeing won 571 sales in Paris. Airbus claimed 336.
At list prices, the Boeing sales haul adds up to $75 billion. The real value, after standard industry discounts, would be about $35 billion, according to market pricing data from aircraft valuation firm Avitas.
However, given that many of the sales were for a new jet model, the discounts agreed to were probably heftier than usual, so even the $35 billion figure might be high.
The Airbus sales are worth about $39 billion at list prices, with an Avitas-estimated real value of $17 billion.
Boeing brought in 147 incremental orders and commitments for the MAX 10, not counting conversions of earlier MAX orders to the new model.
It also won 368 sales of other versions of the MAX, including a large purchase agreement signed Thursday for 125 MAX 8s from "an unidentified major airline customer."
In sales of the larger and more expensive widebody jets, Boeing won 50 sales of the 787 Dreamliner and six of the present model 777 jet.
The 787 sales included an order for 30 from the world's largest aircraft lessor, Aercap, which, with that order, overtook All Nippon Airways of Japan as the largest 787 customer.
Tinseth said the Dreamliner orders "put upward pressure" on the production rate of that airplane.
Boeing is rolling out a dozen 787s per month off its assembly lines in Everett and North Charleston, S.C., and has said it would like to raise that to 14 jets per month by decade's end.
It's been waiting for further orders before firmly committing to do so, and Paris offered a boost to that prospect.
The six orders for the current 777 are also significant, in that they will help bridge the production gap in Everett before Boeing starts manufacturing the new model 777X, Tinseth said.
The one element missing in Paris for Boeing was that it didn't add any new 777X orders.
But Tinseth said that's not a concern.
"We have 340 orders and commitments for the 777X. We are three years away from our first delivery," he said. "Three years out from the first delivery of the (current model) 777-300ER, we stood at just 69 orders."
"So we have time," Tinseth said. "We are confident of that market."
