Leasing market to fill demand-supply gap in India: Boeing

With the domestic aviation industry overcoming the global economic downturn and the air passenger demand on an upward trajectory, the aircraft leasing market is expected to fill the demand-supply gap,Boeing said here today.

"Growth has returned and India is a hot market. There are many airlines, which want to acquire new planes. But acquiring a new aircraft takes a significant time. So, leasing is an option for them wherein they can go to the leasing companies, which buy aircraft in advance for these types of situations," said Boeing India president Dinesh Keskar.

A 12-15 per cent growth on year-on-year basis would be sustainable and around 35-40 aircraft would be required to meet this demand, Keskar said, adding a sizable chunk of these aircraft would be leased ones.

"The growth in the first-half of this year has been 22 per cent. However, it will not sustain and we think that about 12-15 per cent will be a sustainable one," he said.

Indian air-carriers' total fleet-size currently stands at 335 and at 12-15 per cent annually, they will need 35-40 planes per year to meet this demand, Keskar said.

Since the two major aircraft makers, Boeing and Airbus would not be delivering these many aircraft to the Indian carriers in the near future, the gap is likely to be filled by the leasing market, he said.

The demand here is so high that some additional capacity will be filled in by leased planes, he said, adding, "I don't see any issue about leased planes coming into the market in the range of 15 or so in the near future."

Even at the recently-held Farnborough Airshow, many of the orders were from leasing companies, he said.

Boeing has yet to deliver three B-777 aircraft each to Air India and Jet Airways. Besides, it would also be delivering 27 Dreamliners to Air India and 10 to Jet.

The company would also deliver seven Boeing 737-800s to budget airline SpiceJet.

Boeing forecast that India will require 1,150 commercial aircraft amounting to $130 billion over the next 20 years, Keskar said, adding "India will have the highest growth in the next 20 years on a sustainable basis."

Responding to a question on whether SpiceJet, which has recently got the approval for acquiring 30 aircraft, had placed any orders with Boeing, Keskar said, "we are going through the process of actually configuring the aircraft first to what exactly they want."

However, on IndiGo which has sought regulatory nod to acquire 150 aircraft over a period of time, Keskar said neither Boeing had any dialogue with the budget airline nor did it intend to.