While the Boeing Company of the United States battles to become the world's leading aircraft manufacturer, Airbus is getting ahead of its competitors. The European manufacturer produced 69.2 billion euros of revenue in 2024, with earnings of 5.4 euros. Meanwhile, Boeing had its largest annual loss of $11.8 billion, stacking on top of the debt of $53.9 billion.
The popularity of the Airbus A320neo family, Airbus’s main narrow-body aircraft series, supported the company’s success in its earnings. According to each company’s annual report for 2024, the A320neo family had 11,127 orders from more than 140 customers, while the B737MAX family had 6,400 orders from over 110 customers. It shows that Airbus had received 73% more orders than Boeing did, showing that there was much higher demand for Airbus’s A320neo family compared to Boeing’s B737 MAX family.
Airbus A320neo Family
Source: Airbus
Boeing’s struggle with its sales comes from several factors: safety reputation and the B737 MAX 7 and 10. While the MAX family was the aircraft that retrofitted an older B737 design with newer systems, its failure to appropriately apply the MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) led to the worldwide grounding of the MAX family after two fatal crashes. This grounding eventually led the airlines to choose the A320neo family, as they had not experienced any grounding issues at the time. Even though the grounding has stopped, Boeing still cannot deliver their orders of two aircraft in the MAX family—B737 MAX 7 and B737 MAX 10—because of their anti-icing system issue.
Picture taken during Boeing 737 MAX Family grounding
Source: cntraveler.com
After Boeing’s several safety issues and continuous delay of its products, there are possibilities that Airbus may have benefited from Boeing’s failure, eventually making its way to the world’s leading aircraft manufacturer. Not only the Airbus become the leading supplier, it gained a reputation as a safer aircraft manufacturing company.
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