Airbus expects China to need up to 3,000 new large aircraft over the next 20 years, helping support worldwide demand in the face of current economic uncertainties, its chief executive said on Saturday.
Thomas Enders gave the forecast at a meeting of the World Economic Forum being held in Tianjin, the northern Chinese port city where Airbus on Sunday will formally begin production at its first final assembly plant outside Europe.
"That will make China almost as important in terms of market size, or on par, with the United States," the world's largest aviation market, Enders said of the expected growth.
Airbus had earlier projected China would need nearly 2,700 new passenger planes over the next 20 years.
Airbus, the airliner subsidiary of European aerospace group EADS, agreed in 2006 to build the assembly plant in Tianjin to try to win a greater slice of fast-growing plane demand from the world's fourth-largest economy.
"The growth markets are increasingly in Asia and in the Middle East," Enders said.
"These emerging markets... are not just becoming a great market, but increasingly a pool for skills, for talented people, engineering, manufacturing."
