IndiGo, India’s largest carrier, is all set to potentially close in on a record deal to buy 500 narrow-body A320-family jets from Airbus, according to industrial sources.
The European planemaker Airbus has emerged as the front-runner for the order and this move by IndiGo will beat Air India’s historic provisional purchase of 470 jets in February, a source told Reuters on the sidelines of an airline industry meet in Istanbul.
Point to consider is that such a deal would be worth some $50 billion at the most recently published Airbus list prices, but would typically be worth less than half this after widespread airline industry discounts for bulk deals, according to Reuters report.
Meanwhile, Airbus and Boeing are also still competing in separate talks to sell 25 A330neo or Boeing 787 wide-body jets to the same airline. Though there has been no official report on this yet, the IndiGo chief Executive Pieter Elbers who attended the annual meeting of the International Air Transport Association in Istanbul denied commenting of the matter.
As per Reuters March report, IndiGo which has a 56 per cent share of domestic Indian market, was in talks with Airbus and Boeing for the order, which if confirmed would be the largest by a single airline ranked by the number of units.
IndiGo is already one of Airbus’s largest customers and has so far ordered a total of 830 Airbus A302-family jet of which nearly 500 are still to be delivered.
Indian carriers now have second-largest order book, with over 6 per cent share of the industry backlog, behind only the United States, as per Barclays report.
