China buys 130 aircrafts from Airbus, makes announcement during Angela Merkel’s visit

China has signed an agreement with European aerospace manufacturer Airbus to buy 130 aircrafts worth US$17 billion (AU$23.91 billion). The announcement about the China-Europe deal on aerospace trade was made on Thursday as soon as the meeting between Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Beijing was over.

As part of the contract, China ordered 30 wide-body A330s and 100 narrow-body A320s. Merkel was visiting China along with European business leaders with the aim of associating the region with the second-largest economy in the world.

China is the largest trading partner of the European Union, and many European countries, including Germany, Britain and France, are willing to become one of the spots for growing overseas trade of the country’s currency, the yuan.

“We are grateful to CAS [China Aviation Supplies], one of our longest standing customers, for its continued confidence in Airbus and in the versatile A330 Family as well as the best-selling A320 Family,” Airbus President Fabrice Bregier said in a statement.

Airbus had showed interest in building a new facility for assembling in the northern port of Tianjin in China in early 2015. The company, however, was involved in a controversy with U.S.-based Boeing regarding the growing influence of the latter in the Chinese market.

Boeing, however, claimed in August in its annual China Current Market Outlook that China was expected to increase the number of new aircrafts to 6,330 by 2034 so far as its commercial fleet was concerned.

Several EU firms have complained that Beijing poses certain restrictions to European business leaders operating in some of the sectors in China, when there are no such restrictions posed on the Chinese working in Europe.

“At the end of the first day of her visit, Chancellor Merkel met members of Chinese civil society: human rights, lawyers, writers and bloggers,” her spokesperson Steffen Seibert tweeted.

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