Status: 01/11/2023 09:40 a.m
Aerospace group Airbus remains the world’s largest aircraft manufacturer for the fourth year in a row. With 661 machines delivered, the Europeans landed well ahead of their US competitor Boeing in 2022.
The Franco-German Airbus group delivered 661 aircraft last year, which corresponds to an increase of eight percent compared to the previous year. This put Airbus once again in first place in the ranking of the largest aircraft manufacturers. Because the US competitor Boeing was only able to hand over 480 aircraft to customers in 2022 despite a final spurt.
The background to Boeing’s weak performance was primarily home-grown problems. The Seattle-based company is still struggling with the aftermath of safety flaws on its best-selling Boeing 737 MAX model and production problems with the 787 Dreamliner.
Airbus misses its own delivery target
But Airbus also faced problems in the past year: In view of the tight supply chains, the manufacturer was unable to meet the booming demand for new aircraft as planned. Airbus boss Guillaume Faury had actually planned 700 deliveries for 2022, but had to accept the goal at the beginning of December.
“The year 2023 will also be complex,” said Faury. The situation stabilized somewhat in autumn, but now the energy crisis in Europe and the abrupt change in corona policy in China have presented Airbus with new challenges, according to the CEO.
Significantly more orders than Boeing
However, the manager stuck to his plans for record production in the coming years when the figures were presented last night. An important reason for this is the increasingly full order books.
Because Airbus is also ahead of the game when it comes to orders in direct comparison with its archrival: From January to December, the DAX group received 1078 orders for commercial aircraft, after deducting cancellations, 820 orders remained. With the Americans, the new orders in 2022 amounted to 774 net. The order backlog at Airbus totals more than 7200, at Boeing it is just over 4500.
Airbus hopes for success of the A320 family
Airbus has high hopes for its A320neo family for the years to come. Anyone who orders a medium-haul jet from the Airbus A320neo model family today will have to wait until 2029 for delivery, said sales manager Christian Scherer in a conference call with journalists. “We could sell far more A320s if we had more capacity.”
That is why the manufacturer wants to expand production of the A320neo family to 65 jets a month by 2024 and to 75 machines by 2025, as confirmed by Airbus boss Faury. This is also due to the planned long-haul version A321XLR. Even before its first test flight last June, Airbus had collected orders for more than 500 examples of this variant.
Therefore, the planned ramp-up of production of the A320/A321 series of short-haul aircraft will be delayed “by a few months”. So far, Airbus wanted to return to the level before the corona pandemic with the bestseller by early 2024: 65 aircraft per month. Yesterday Faury only wanted to commit to the year 2024, when this mark would be reached. The manager does not want to forecast how many aircraft Airbus will deliver in the current year until the annual balance sheet is presented on February 16.
Boeing is catching up on the stock market
Meanwhile, Boeing has recently been catching up on the stock market: in the past six months, Boeing shares in New York have gained almost 44 percent. Airbus stocks rose just 14 percent over the same period. But in the long-term perspective, Airbus is still ahead: Within five years, the paper climbed 28 percent, while Boeing shares collapsed by 37 percent.