Airbus and Boeing order patterns

Is there any pattern to be found in the orders announced by these two major OEMs? After all, it is a common thought these two "bank" orders for air shows. What does the data show? An important point to note is that June is the month for the Farnborough show and July is the month for the Paris show. If orders are "banked" then as these are the two biggest shows, that is when we should see skies in the numbers. Here's the Airbus data. The yellow highlights are the highest month for a given year. The orange highlights any two months that represent that year's peak. Along the bottom, we show the average for the years listed for each month. The data suggest that Airbus does not bank orders for the summer shows. Though of the two shows, Paris definitely gets more attention in terms of being a high month. What we can clearly see is that Airbus might be banking orders for December. On average nearly a quarter of a year's orders are made in December. This suggests that Airbus is sensitive to the annual"order race" with Boeing. It is interesting to see the 2007 year end deals slipped into January 2008 though. Airbus' hottest selling aircraft, the A320neo, was launched in December 2010 and we see an associated spike in that period. The most interesting spike is the December 2017 number where over two-thirds of the year's orders came in. It is an anomaly and we double checked the number - it was 841 aircraft for that month! Here are the numbers for Boeing. The same highlight rules are used as above. Like Airbus, Boeing seems to bank orders for the annual order race in December, when sales teams must be under great pressure to win. Whereas Airbus favors Paris for their big orders, it looks like Boeing favors Farnborough. The 737 MAX was launch November 2011 for comparison purposes to the A320neo. No surprise, December 2011 was Boeing's best that year. Are Boeing's orders are less spiky than Airbus? In fact, both OEMs show similar spikes over the period outside of December, making the tables very similar. For an airline fleet buyer here's what you need to take away. Start negotiating in the summer but plan to seal a deal in December. The later in the month the better. Watch the order patterns carefully to play the OEMs against each other. If you are buying from one OEM, watch the other OEM's orders carefully so you don't overplay your hand. OEM sales teams are under huge pressure in December, that is clear and the advantage lies with buyers in December.

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