Business

/

ArcaMax

China agrees to order 200 Boeing aircraft, Trump says

Lauren Rosenblatt, The Seattle Times on

Published in Business News

China has reportedly placed an order for 200 Boeing aircraft, marking Boeing’s first order in nearly a decade from one of the fastest growing aviation markets.

President Donald Trump said on a Fox News interview Thursday that China’s President Xi Jinping agreed to place an order for 200 Boeing planes, part of trade negotiations taking place during Trump’s two-day visit to Beijing this week. Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg and several other business leaders joined Trump on the trip.

Ortberg told analysts on Boeing’s quarterly earnings call last month that a large China order may come during Trump’s trade summit, noting that such an order was “100% dependent on the U.S.-China negotiations and relations.”

Ortberg stopped short of detailing how many planes China might order but said “it’s a big number.”

The agreement President Trump discussed on Fox News was far smaller than rumors circulating before the trade delegation’s visit, which projected China might order 500 737 MAX planes, as well as 100 widebody aircraft, including the 787 and yet-to-be-certified 777X.

Boeing's stock fell nearly 5% Thursday after the order announcement.

President Trump did not elaborate on what types of planes China agreed to purchase.

Boeing didn't respond immediately to a request for comment.

China hasn’t placed an order for Boeing aircraft since 2017. Two fatal 737 MAX crashes, the COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical tension with the U.S. have kept the country from committing to a high-value order.

 

China’s last order with Boeing also came during a visit with President Trump, during his first term in office. At the time, China placed an order for 300 single-aisle and twin-aisle aircraft, valued at more than $37 billion, according to a Boeing news release.

It's unclear how many Boeing aircraft China has already ordered in total; the manufacturer often lists orders as slotted for unidentified customers. But China likely accounts for 10% of Boeing’s backlog, which totaled more than 6,000 planes at the end of April, according to an investor note from Jefferies analyst Sheila Kahyaoglu before Trump’s visit.

China is an important market for the planemaker. Boeing expects airline traffic in China to grow more than 5% every year for the next 20 years, according to its annual commercial market outlook.

To accommodate that growth, Boeing expects China's aircraft fleet will double, reaching 9,755 planes by 2044.

Boeing forecasts China will receive 9,000 planes in that time period, including some that will replace aging planes that China's airlines will retire. That number may include deliveries from other planemakers. Boeing’s market outlook is not exclusive to its own products.

That’s Boeing's highest delivery forecast for any region. Eurasia and North America come next, with each region expecting about 8,900 deliveries over the next two decades.

Another large order from China this week would allow Boeing to tap into that predicted air traffic growth, as it competes with Europe’s Airbus and China’s own manufacturer COMAC.


©2026 The Seattle Times. Visit seattletimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

 

Comments

blog comments powered by Disqus