Boeing Commercial Airplanes is ready and willing to step back into financing customer aircraft, CEO Scott Carson revealed at the show yesterday.
“There’s a likelihood we’ll have to do that, and we have taken the steps to do that when needed,” he said during his set piece Farnborough press conference.
While he recognises that the industry crisis caused by high fuel prices is hitting airlines hard, Carson’s outlook for Boeing remains bullish. “We expect the book to build this year,” he says, referring to Boeing’s record backlog of orders.
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A handful of carriers have deferred some deliveries for a “year or two”, he says, but so far Boeing has received “no cancellations”. The strong replacement market for older less fuel efficient types is one of the reasons for Carson’s optimism.
However, he has put aside an undeclared war chest of money to provide customer financing. This has not been tapped so far and Boeing is watching the market to see how it responds to the crisis and what financing requests it receives. Boeing has radically pared back its customer financing in recent years to virtually nothing in terms of helping airlines with new deliveries.
Source: Flight International
