S'pore air show to witness hard sell by aviation firms
S'pore air show to witness hard sell by aviation firms
SINGAPORE (Reuter): Asia's biggest air show opens in Singapore next week with top aerospace and defense firms gunning for a slice of one of the world's fastest-growing aviation and defense markets.
The Asian Aerospace show, from February 6 to 11, will witness hard-sell tactics by companies offering everything from the latest in the Boeing family to the famous American B2- "Stealth" bomber and Belgian night and thermal vision goggles for fighter pilots.
Some 929 firms from 36 countries, down slightly from the last show in 1994, aim to make their presence felt at the show.
Civilian plane-makers like Boeing and its archrival Airbus Industrie ARBU.N and military aircraft manufacturers from the U.S., Britain, France and Russia will be at the air show's Changi site to hawk their hardware.
Asian nations, helped by their booming economies, offer tremendous opportunities for both military and civilian sectors, industry analysts said.
They said Asian states are either beefing up or re-equipping their armed forces to help protect the resources fueling their prosperity.
"The region of Southeast Asia is one of the last in the world where defense budgets continue to expand in the post Cold War era," Derek da Cunha, of Singapore's Institute of South East Asian Studies, told a recent Bangkok defense conference.
"Between the years 2005 and 2010, the ASEAN armed forces will deploy a formidable array of hardware, the most notable aspects of which being submarines and fixed-wing aircraft," he said.
Da Cunha said by then the combined strength of the current seven-member ASEAN air forces could well be close to 1,000 planes, up by 20 percent in size from today's total of around 800.
Strike and interceptor aircraft may include upgraded versions of the Lockeed Martin Corp F-16C/D, McDonnell Douglas F/A-18, Russian MIG-29 and Sukhoi models and British Aerospace Hawk aircraft.
The seven-member ASEAN groups the countries of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
French Dassault Aviation's Rafale fighter will be in Singapore for its first appearance in Asia.
Britain's crack Red Arrows aerobatics team, flying the Hawk jet trainer, will make their debut in Singapore following their visit to Brunei, the tiny, oil-rich sultanate on Borneo, to try to boost U.K. plane sales.
In the civilian sector, the Singapore show precedes major orders by top Asian airlines, led by Singapore Airlines Ltd and Malaysian Airline System Bhd (MAS), in the past weeks.
SIA ordered 77 state-of-the-art Boeing 777 aircraft worth US$12.7 billion while MAS took 15 Boeing 777s and 10 Boeing 747- 400s valued at $4.0 billion as part of their fleet expansion programs.
The Singapore air show is generally regarded as the world's third most important after Paris and Britain's Farnborough air shows.
"We are very targeted," Jimmy Lau, managing director of Asian Aerospace Pte Ltd, the show organizers. "Five or six of the world's most profitable airlines are in the Asia-Pacific region.