MOSCOW, June 22 (RIA Novosti) - A senior Airbus official has said that the company intends to capture at least half the Russian market of planes seating more than 100 passengers in the next two decades.
In an interview published in today's issue of Biznes, a business daily, Chris Buckley, the Airbus senior vice president for customer affairs, said Russia would require more than 600 of these new planes in the next 20 years and the European company planned to deliver about 300 of them.
He said Airbus was satisfied with how relations were developing with Russian companies. The country's chief air carrier, Aeroflot, now has 18 A320 liners, and Sibir, another prominent airline, has three A310s.
Buckley said he hoped talks with Aeroflot on leasing 12-16 new planes would be concluded by late 2005. The airline is mostly interested in the A321, which can carry a maximum of 220 passengers.
Buckley said the Russian aircraft industry still had huge potential. The country had competitive products, such as the Tupolev Tu-204 liner, which has the same dimensions as some planes in the A320 family. The Airbus vice president said that his company believed the main problem with the plane was that a post-sale servicing system had not been established completely.
Moreover, Buckley said Russia had some promising projects, such as the Russian Regional Jet and Antonov An-148. He advised Russian companies to pursue more aggressive marketing strategies.
Russian factories that operate below capacity are ready to assemble Western aircraft. For instance, Eclipse Aviation, which is based in New Mexico (USA), has chosen to serially produce its six-seater Eclipse-500 executive jets at the Aviastar plant in Ulyanovsk (the Urals).
However, Buckley said Airbus did not need to assemble planes in Russia, as it could expand production at its two assembly lines in Toulouse (France) and Hamburg (Germany).
