Asia-Pacific: The Future is Now

Transcript

Bence:Good morning, everybody. Good morning. Good morning. It's a real privilege to be here on a personal note because my first job out of university was at CAPA. So I'm back 20 years later in our family here. It's a real privilege. So thank you very much. The title of my presentation is Asia-Pacific: The Future Is Now. So it's very much future-looking and it's trying to weave together Asia-Pacific and sustainability. Aviation is an irresistible and indeed can't-stop-it force in the Asia-Pacific. And today I've got 4 messages for you. The first one is that for sustainability and to allow the growth that Asia-Pacific has the growth potential, We already have the right products, the next generation aircraft. More than that though, Airbus is secondly investing in new disruptive technologies. Thirdly, we're working with our customers, you, to bring about SAF, to bring about that big lever that we need to decarbonise. And fourthly, we continue to invest in new products to help airlines be more efficient and to go along the decarbonisation journey. So the future is now. Okay, every year we at Airbus put out our global market forecast, the 20-year view of what aircraft are required for the industry. We just announced this: 19,500 new aircraft are required in the Asia-Pacific over the next 20 years. So those are aircraft that from today are going to be delivered, 19,500. And the interesting point is it's 46% of total global demand for new aircraft in that 20-year period. So the Asia-Pacific is the future. And really, it's driven by the strong fundamentals that have been mentioned today— GDP growth, a growing population driving higher propensity to travel. So this is probably the most busy chart I have. On the left, we have 2023, the propensity to travel on the y-axis, The biggest bubble there in the centre is China, GDP per capita along the x-axis. As we fast forward 20 years, we see that China moves up the propensity to travel to nearly 2 trips per person. And that's, along with all the other countries in the Asia-Pacific, is what's going to drive the need for new aircraft. And also fleet modernisation. So a lot of the new aircraft will be replacement. Fleet modernisation is actually the first step in decarbonising our industry, the first step in that important journey. What we have there is only 30% of the global fleet is new generation aircraft. We have a lot of aircraft to replace to bring about what are 25%, up to 25% improvements in fuel efficiency and therefore carbon. Okay. Let's reflect a little bit on what makes Asia-Pacific special from an aircraft perspective. It is a wide-body market. We have many, many wide-bodies flying around the Asia-Pacific, and according to our global market forecast, we see over the next 20 years demand for a new— for 3,500 new wide-body aircraft. So a huge number, and again, the more interesting part is it's 41% of the total demand for wide-body aircraft over the next 20 years. So the Asia-Pacific is leading in the wide-body space. as growth grows. And how are we going to meet that demand? Well, at Airbus, we are proposing our flagship A350, which we are seeing as being the natural replacement for widebodies in that replacement cycle that's coming up. The A350 has established itself as a benchmark standard in efficiency, also in passenger comfort. And here we don't just mean space, we mean cabin altitude, we mean noise. It's the most beautiful cabin to travel in, and of course reliability. The aircraft next year will celebrate its 10 years in service. So the A350, as those large widebodies that we love sail off into the sunset, we think will be the replacement. And I do want to just share with you the recent activity on the A350. So in the last 2 years, we've been fortunate to sell over 400 A350s around the world. So that replacement is happening. And I think what I'd like to highlight here is that we have 9 new customers for the larger A350-1000 variant. And that's important because that is the replacement cycle that's coming up in the region. And many of those customers have been here in the Asia-Pacific region and were existing operators of 777-300ERs. So we have Air India, Philippine Airlines, Korean, among others, who've replaced their 777s with A350s. So we're very happy about that. And, you know, it's what's going to help us decarbonise, get more efficient aircraft. It's a busy slide, I'm sorry. But it's not the only widebody aircraft we have. We need a mid-size widebody aircraft, and at Airbus we have the A330. Yeah. And here I want to highlight what's special about the A330. It is the most popular widebody ever. There are 1,400 A330s flying around the world today with about 150 operators. So many, many airlines, many, many aircraft. And indeed in the Asia-Pacific, we have about 500 A330ceos still flying around in China, in Asia, and these will need to be replaced. And so what we decided at Airbus was to bring new generation technology to a successful proven platform. Voilà, the A330neo. So what's special about this aircraft? Well, it has a new wing, it has a new engine, and a new cabin. And let me just explain a little bit about aircraft here. So sorry if I get a bit technical, but it has a larger wing, 3.7 metres longer. We've added blended winglets inspired by the A350, and we've accommodated the new Trent 7000 engines which have double the bypass ratio, so much better efficiency. So it's different from what we did on the A320neo programme where we just added the larger engines. Here we redesigned the whole wing. We also added extra seats with cabin enablers and completely redid the cabin. If you've had a chance to see the A330neo cabin, you'll, you'll be surprised if you've ever been on a CEO. The bins are bigger, the lighting's new, And all of this, all of this adds up to a 14% improvement in fuel consumption per seat. So this aircraft for this market is going to deliver that sustainability benefit quite quickly and quite easily. And we're actually very pleased that the market is also responding positively. So this year alone, we've had 75 orders and commitments for the A330neo. And that includes, if I just break it down a little bit, 3 new neo customers. So they're customers that are operating the A330 today and went for the new improved variant. Chiefly amongst them, we're humbled by Cathay Pacific's landmark order earlier this year here in Hong Kong. We've also had 2 top-up orders from existing A330neo customers. They like the plane. It delivers for them. So we're very excited. And I just wanted to highlight this because this aircraft is going to play an important role in the Asia-Pacific region. In that fleet modernisation piece. Okay, back to the global market forecast for single-aisle. We forecast 16,000 single-aisle aircraft are needed in the region over the coming 20 years. So clearly single-aisle aircraft will remain the backbone of our fleets everywhere. But what will be a bit different in the coming 20 years is we'll see many, many more A220s flying around the region. And let me, let me share a little bit why I think this aircraft will be filling our skies. The A220 is the only clean-sheet design single-aisle aircraft today. It's a modern new aircraft and it's purpose-built for efficiency. So it's been designed with the aerodynamics, the proportions, everything in mind to be as efficient as possible. The wings are fully integrated with the engine and And the cabin is completely new, the 5-abreast comfortable cabin. So this aircraft delivers today 25% per seat fuel improvement versus previous generation aircraft. So it's providing airlines a real lever to decarbonise, but also it is super versatile. It's an aircraft that today can operate in the most difficult airports. So London City here, where both Swiss and ITA operate services, And we have an all-economy, super-efficient, 160-seat cabin, all-economy cabin. This is basically an LCC aircraft as well. And we see this coming to the region. And why is that important? Well, we talked about growth. Some of the other panellists talked about where the growth was going to come from. And the growth is going to come from new routes. So when we looked at the future of Asia-Pacific, We know we need more secondary markets, and we see the potential for up to, or even more than, 650 routes in the Asia-Pacific, routes that aren't being operated today. And we think the A220 is perfect for these because it's smaller than an A320, so you can open routes more easily, and it has the range, 3,600 nautical miles, equivalent to about 7 hours flying, to link up many, many different secondary markets in Asia-Pacific. And one point I want to sort of maybe link to what happened in Europe, that low-per that I showed you, the 160-seat economy, that's basically the size of the easyJet A319s that that airline used to grow throughout Europe linking secondary markets. So we think that's going to come to the Asia-Pacific region across You know, all those markets. Okay, so we have some new aircraft that deliver today up to 25% reduction in carbon emissions. Let me go to the really big picture now of getting to net zero as an industry. And as some panellists have said before, there is no one solution to decarbonise our industry. I'll talk a little bit about this chart because it's quite important. Most of you will be familiar, I know. Yeah. The top line there is the do-nothing scenario from 2019. If we continue to grow volumes without changing anything, we would be obviously emitting much, much more carbon. What I've described up until the last few slides was the top blue bar, which is the impact of fleet modernization. So introducing new generation technology. The future is now. It's available today. But it's not the biggest lever. We've got 2 other very important levers there, disruptive technologies and sustainable aviation fuel. And we need to work on all of those simultaneously to get anywhere near our decarbonisation targets as an industry. So I'll just spend a minute or 2 sharing what Airbus is doing in those domains. And the reason I want to share this is because of our purpose. So honestly, Airbus has a really good corporate purpose. It's not jargon, generic words, you know, spat out by ChatGPT. At Airbus, we pioneer sustainable aerospace for a safer, united world. And the key word there is pioneer. We take the responsibility ourselves to change the industry. And in the domain of disruptive technologies, we are leading that by investing in bringing a new hydrogen-powered aircraft to the market by 2035. That is our ambition. An aircraft that doesn't exist today, but we are investing heavily in. We've got hundreds of engineers working on it. We're testing different, you know, models. We're even flying the fuel cell technology on the A380. And we've selected hydrogen because it also has secondary benefits potentially in producing SAF. So we are taking our responsibility seriously. Now the biggest lever is SAF. So what does an OEM do about SAF? Well, we work with you, our airline partners, and here we're acting as a catalyst at Airbus. So I put up some photos, specifically some people, to highlight that it's partnerships that will get SAF off the ground. We started in this region the journey on SAF with Qantas back in 2022. And it was led by our CEO, Guillaume Faury. Recently, up in North Asia, in Taiwan, we announced with EVA a couple of weeks ago a partnership to develop SAF alongside them. And again, it was our CEO of Commercial Aircraft, Christian Scherer, that was there. So we are committed. And then finally, down in Southeast Asia, we have our Chief Sustainability Officer, Julie Kitcher, with Malaysia Airlines working to develop SAF roadmaps and bring more supply online. So I just want to highlight here that we are working on the different angles together with our customers, and we are also doing the things that we can only do as an OEM. Okay, my 4th point. We continue to invest in new generation aircraft. So this is our freighter. It's launching in not, not too soon, not too distant future. So we saw a need in the market for a new freighter. We saw that the emission standards coming in from ICAO were going to put an end to the existing freighter platforms. We also saw that we had a fantastic platform in the A350. And so over the last few years, we've actually been working with our airline customers to define what a new freighter would look like. to bring competition to the freighter market, the large freighter market. And what we came up with was the A350F, which is the only true new generation freighter available in the market today. And it's going to deliver 40% lower fuel burn versus the 747Fs that they're replacing. I mean, that is available now. And that's the theme of my presentation. The future is now. We're working on everything, but you have options as airlines. to decarbonise. So on that note, I end with a sexy picture of Hong Kong and just reiterate that at Airbus, we are taking our responsibility seriously. And this is the region where it's going to happen because this is where it needs to happen. Thank you very much. Thank you, Bence.

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