Premium #333 – Does the MAX10 mean the death of the MAX9?

The Boeing 737 MAX10 was the hit of the Paris Air Show, garnering 326 commitments for the aircraft.  But the majority of those commitments, 179 of them, were simply swapping of one model of the MAX family for another, and didn’t increase the backlog for the program.  We suspect that most of the swaps, including the 100 aircraft commitment from United , were from the MAX9 to the MAX10, which has better performance and economics, despite slightly shorter range.

Of the 147 new commitments for the MAX10, only 43 were firm orders at the show, which seemed the trend at Paris this year.  Overall, only about 25% of the orders announced at the show were firm, down from prior years.  While the vast majority of commitments typically do turn into orders, some will occasionally fall through.  We prefer to deal in firm order backlog when analyzing the success of particular models, but are confident that the virtually all of the MAX10 commitments announced at Paris will turn into firm orders.  Airshows

are the time for CEOs to make the deals, and then delegate to their staffs to vet and finalize the details in due course.

The success of the competing A321 versus the MAX9 made it quite clear that Boeing missed the market with that version of the aircraft, as it was outsold by a 5:1 margin according to most industry reports.  Boeing, apparently embarrassed by the poor performance of the MAX7 and MAX9, stopped reporting orders by model for the first time in their storied history when it came to the 737 MAX.  The reality of the situation was that Airbus has effectively a two product family with the A320 and A321, and Boeing effectively has one product family with the MAX8.