Ground breaking ceremony for the Airbus Tianjin A330 completion and delivery center on Wednesday. (Photo/Courtesy of Airbus)
Construction on an Airbus A330 completion and delivery center started Wednesday in North China's Tianjin, marking the aircraft manufacturer's first such plant for wide-body planes outside Europe.
With the establishment of the center, the company's cooperation with China's aviation partners has expanded from single-aisle aircraft to wide-body planes.
The center is an extension of Airbus' current Tianjin assembly plant, which is responsible for the delivery of A320 single-aisle aircraft. Once the new center completes construction, aircraft assembled in Toulouse, France will fly to Tianjin for cabin installation, painting and flight tests before delivery to customers. The completion and delivery center is expected to deliver at most two A330 planes per month, and Airbus plans to deliver the first A330 airplane from the new Tianjin center in 2017.
With the new project, Tianjin will be Airbus' Asian center, not one solely for Chinese customers.
China is already Airbus' largest market, with Chinese airlines operating more than 1,240 Airbus planes, including more than 1,000 single-aisle A320 aircraft and about 170 wide-body A330s.
The Airbus A330 is a popular wide-body aircraft in the domestic civil aviation sector.
According to the Airbus global market forecast, China is leading the world in passenger growth.
China's domestic air traffic will become the world's largest within the next 10 years, and traffic volume will quadruple in the next two decades. From 2015 to 2034, Airbus has estimated that China will need some 5,400 new passenger and freighter aircraft including 1,700 wide-body ones like the A330, A350 and A380.
On July 2, 2015, Airbus signed a framework agreement with the Tianjin Free Trade Zone Investment Co and Aviation Industry Corp of China on setting up a completion and delivery center for wide-body planes in the city, extending their original partnership on narrow-body A320s to a higher level.
The signing was witnessed by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and French Prime Minister Manuel Valls.
