Singapore Airlines Group has announced that it has converted orders for fourteen B787-10s into eleven B777-9s as a part of its new agreement with Boeing regarding future deliveries. The group also reached an agreement with Airbus.
The carrier did not provide a detailed year-by-year timeline but said that agreements with both manufacturers would see "the delivery stream spread out beyond the immediate five years".
Following the adjustments, Singapore Airlines currently has the following aircraft on firm order:
- thirty-one B777-9s (previously 20),
- fifteen A350-900s (no change),
- twenty B787s, including three B787-8s for Scoot, two B787-9s also for Scoot, and fifteen B787-10s for Singapore Airlines (previously 34 in total),
- thirty-one B737-8s originally ordered for SilkAir but due to join Singapore Airlines as a part of the merger of SilkAir (no change), and
- thirty-five A320neo Family narrowbodies for Scoot, including twenty-nine A320-200Ns and six A321-200NXes (no change).
The group said the revised timeline in total would allow it to defer SGD4 billion Singaporean dollars (USD3 billion) in expenditure originally planned between April 2020 and March 2024 to later years. The bulk of these deferrals concern expenses initially budgeted for in the current financial year ending on March 31, 2021 (a decrease from SGD5.3 billion to SGD3.1 billion (from USD4 billion to USD2.3 billion)) in capital expenditure). In the next financial year, from April 2021 to March 2022, the group's capital expenditure will drop from SGD5.7 billion to SGD4 billion (from USD4.3 billion to USD3 billion).
"The agreements with Airbus and Boeing are a key plank of our strategy to navigate the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. They allow us to defer capital expenditure and recalibrate the rate at which we add capacity, aligning both with the projected recovery trajectory for international air travel," Chief Executive Goh Choon Phong said.
