Tag Archives: global economic growth

Boeing cuts jet demand forecast on pandemic crisis

By Eric M. Johnson and Tim Hepher

SEATTLE/PARIS (Reuters) – Boeing cut its rolling 20-year forecast for airplane demand on Tuesday, sending its shares lower as the COVID-19 pandemic lays waste to deliveries over the next few years.

The U.S. plane maker, which dominates jet sales together with Europe’s Airbus, forecast 43,110 commercial aircraft deliveries over the next 20 years, down 2% from 44,040 projected a year ago and worth an unchanged $6.8 trillion at list prices.

While fleets are still expected to almost double, it is the first time since the 2009 financial crisis that Boeing has cut the 20-year demand forecast in terms of the number of deliveries.

Boeing, also for the first time, lifted the lid on the first half of the 20-year period, showing steep declines for the coming decade on the heels of the COVID-19 crisis. It predicted 18,350 deliveries for 2020-2029, down 10.7% from an unpublished forecast of 20,550 embedded in the last report.

“The industry clearly has been dramatically impacted … by the pandemic,” Commercial Marketing Vice-President Darren Hulst said.

Boeing shares fell as much as 3.3% after the report.

A key forecast for passenger traffic growth – once a reliable 5% a year – has been edging lower since 2015 as a record aviation boom peaked. But it took a sharp knock lower in the latest report, falling to 4% from 4.6% a year ago.

Boeing, America’s largest exporter, lowered its assumption for average global economic growth over 20 years to 2.5% from 2.7% after the pandemic plunged key markets into recession.

Even so, Boeing expressed confidence that demand would return towards previous trends in the 2030’s, just as it did after earlier economic shocks. Environmentalist critics say the crisis is an opportunity for the industry to get smaller.

WEAK DEMAND FOR BIG JETS

“It will take longer from this crisis but … the industry will prove resilient again; the fundamentals aren’t changing,” Hulst said.

Demand will be buoyed in part by a rise in the number of replacements as airlines accelerate the retirement of older jets to save running costs and meet environmental goals.

Thousands of jets have been parked during the crisis, especially long-haul twin-aisle models, owing to the widespread border restrictions choking international air travel.

Boeing cut its 20-year forecast for twin-aisle models such as its 787 Dreamliner and the Airbus A350 by more than 10%. At 7,480 jets, down from 8,340 a year ago, that part of the 20-year forecast is now lower than 8,000 for the first time since 2010.

Twin-aisle demand will be especially slow in the next 10 years with deliveries of only 3,060 aircraft, Boeing said.

The 20-year forecast for smaller single-aisle jets, such as the grounded 737 MAX, dipped 0.5% from the last survey. Previously Boeing had been revising it up by about 3.5-4% year in, year out.

Boeing now sees 32,270 deliveries in the medium-haul single-aisle category, traditionally the cash cow of large plane makers. That includes 13,570 deliveries between now and 2029.

Although medium-haul travel is showing signs of revival, particularly in the booming China market, airlines there continue to sit on the sidelines amid U.S. trade tensions.

While global passenger demand has been mauled by COVID-19, demand for freighters has gone up as shippers seek alternatives to the cargo space being left empty in unused passenger jets.

Despite that near-term bump, Boeing cut its 20-year forecast for freighters by 10.6% to 930 jets on weaker trade and a move by carriers to group shipments into bigger jets to reduce costs.

(Reporting by Eric M. Johnson in Seattle; Editing by Mark Potter and David Goodman)

Trump favors ‘whole deal’ with China, two sides prepare for trade talks

By Jeff Mason and Chris Prentice

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump said on Thursday he preferred a comprehensive trade deal with China but did not rule out the possibility of an interim pact, even as he said an “easy” agreement would not be possible.

“I’d rather get the whole deal done,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “I see a lot of analysts are saying an interim deal, meaning we’ll do pieces of it, the easy ones first. But there’s no easy or hard. There’s a deal or there’s not a deal. But it’s something we would consider, I guess.”

The president’s remarks came as the world’s two largest economies prepare for new rounds of talks aimed at curbing a more-than-year-long trade war that has hurt global economic growth and rattled financial markets.

The two sides have been making conciliatory gestures ahead of the talks, lowering the temperature between them and cheering investors.

China renewed purchases of U.S. farm goods, which the United States welcomed, and Trump delayed a tariff increase on certain Chinese goods by two weeks in honor, he said, of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Lower-level U.S. and Chinese officials are expected to meet next week in Washington ahead of talks between senior trade negotiators in early October. Top-level negotiators last met face-to-face in China in July.

Washington is pressing China to end practices it considers unfair, including intellectual property theft, industrial subsidies, currency manipulation, and forced technology transfer from U.S. companies to Chinese counterparts.

Trump has made clear he wants such elements to be part of a deal and has demonstrated his resolve through tariff increases, even when they dented gains in the stock market.

Meeting U.S. demands would require structural change in China, which so far it has been unwilling to make. The two sides came close to a deal in May, but Chinese officials balked at requirements that Chinese laws be altered as part of the deal.

ECONOMIC IMPACT

The trade war is affecting the global economy. The International Monetary Fund on Thursday forecast that U.S. and Chinese tit-for-tat tariffs could reduce global GDP in 2020 by 0.8% and trigger more losses afterward.

Still, global stocks rose on Thursday after the conciliatory gestures from both sides.

China importers bought at least 10 cargoes, or 600,000 tonnes, of U.S. soybeans for October-December shipment, the country’s most significant purchases since at least June, U.S. traders with direct knowledge of the deals said.

That came after Trump on Wednesday announced his delay in the increase in tariffs on some Chinese goods by two weeks and China exempted some U.S. drugs and other goods from tariffs.

While welcoming China’s overtures, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin sought to temper optimism in markets that the gestures might lead to a trade deal. He told CNBC that Trump was prepared to keep or even raise tariffs on Chinese imports and that Beijing had asked for more concessions beyond the removal of tariffs.

“The next month is important,” Mnuchin said at a later event hosted by the New York Times. “We’re hopeful we’ll make progress. If we can get the right deal, we’ll do a deal.”

NO CHANGE ‘ON THE FUNDAMENTALS’

The Wall Street Journal reported that China was seeking to narrow the scope of negotiations to trade matters by excluding national security issues. National security issues have not, however, been a key topic in the trade talks so far.

The soybean purchases sent benchmark prices of the commodity, of which China is the top buyer, soaring. They were the largest by private Chinese importers since Beijing raised import tariffs on the U.S. oilseed by 25% in July 2018 in retaliation for U.S. duties on Chinese goods. Duties were raised an additional 5% this month.

U.S. farmers, a core component of Trump’s political base, have been among the hardest hit by the tariff battle that began more than a year ago and has escalated in recent weeks.

Earlier in the day in Beijing, Commerce Ministry spokesman Gao Feng said Chinese firms have started to inquire about prices for U.S. farm goods. He also said that China welcomed the U.S. delay to its scheduled tariff hike on billions of dollars worth of Chinese goods.

“(China) hopes both sides would continue to meet each other half way and adopt concrete actions to create favorable conditions for negotiations,” Gao told a briefing, noting that possible purchases included pork and soybeans, both of which are still subject to hefty Chinese duties.

China has bought U.S. pork despite tariffs of 62% in place since last year because huge numbers of pigs have been culled across the country as Beijing struggles to contain an outbreak of African swine fever. The world’s biggest pork consumer has hiked imports to make up the shortfall.

China said it would reduce purchases of U.S. farm products in August after Trump vowed to impose new tariffs on around $300 billion of Chinese goods.

On Wednesday Trump announced a delay in increasing tariffs on $250 billion worth of Chinese imports to Oct. 15 from Oct. 1. The tariffs on those goods were set to increase to 30% from 25%.

Earlier that day China announced it was exempting 16 types of U.S. products from tariffs, including some anti-cancer drugs and lubricants, as well as animal feed ingredients whey and fish meal.

William Reinsch, a former senior U.S. Commerce Department official, said the goodwill gestures should help, but big hurdles remained.

“Both sides are trying to find a way out of the box,” he said. “Short term, that’s good. But I don’t think anything’s changed on the fundamentals, and once they get back to the table, they’ll discover that.”

(Additional reporting by Stella Qiu, Ben Blanchard, Michael Martina, and Dominique Patton in Beijing, and Andrea Shalal in Washington; Editing by Sandra Maler)

Exclusive: U.S., China sketch outlines of deal to end trade war – sources

FILE PHOTO: U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, second from left, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, third from left, and Chinese Vice Premier and lead trade negotiator Liu He, second from right, pose for a photo before the opening session of trade negotiations at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, Thursday, Feb. 14, 2019. Mark Schiefelbein/Pool via REUTERS

By Jeff Mason

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States and China have started to outline commitments in principle on the stickiest issues in their trade dispute, marking the most significant progress yet toward ending a seven-month trade war, according to sources familiar with the negotiations.

The world’s two largest economies have slapped tit-for-tat tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of goods, slowing global economic growth, skewing supply chains and disrupting manufacturing.

As officials hold high-level talks on Thursday and Friday in Washington, they remain far apart on demands made by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration for structural changes to China’s economy.

But the broad outline of what could make up a deal is beginning to emerge from the talks, the sources said, as the two sides push for an agreement by March 1. That marks the end of a 90-day truce that Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to when they met in Argentina late last year.

Negotiators are drawing up six memorandums of understanding on structural issues: forced technology transfer and cyber theft, intellectual property rights, services, currency, agriculture, and non-tariff barriers to trade, according to two sources familiar with the progress of the talks.

At meetings between U.S. and Chinese officials last week in Beijing the two sides traded texts and worked on outlining obligations on paper, according to one of the sources.

The process has become a real trade negotiation, the source said, so much so that at the end of the week the participants considered staying in Beijing to keep working. Instead they agreed to take a few days off and reconvene in Washington.

The sources requested anonymity to speak candidly about the talks.

Chinese Commerce Ministry spokesman Gao Feng on Thursday declined to comment on the MOUs.

U.S. equity index futures initially rallied on the news of progress in the talks, with the S&P 500’s e-mini futures contract gaining about 0.4 percent over the following hour during Asian trading. The dollar strengthened and U.S. Treasury security yields rose.

U.S. stocks later retreated in Thursday’s Wall Street session following a batch of weaker-than-expected economic data, though the dollar and bond yields remained modestly higher.

GETTING COMMITMENTS IN WRITING

The MOUs cover the most complex issues affecting the trading relationship between the two countries and are meant, from the U.S. perspective, to end the practices that led Trump to start levying duties on Chinese imports in the first place.

One source cautioned that the talks could still end in failure. But the work on the MOUs was a significant step in getting China to sign up both to broad principles and to specific commitments on key issues, he said.

Several Chinese government sources told Reuters that the two countries have basically reached a consensus on alleviating the trade imbalances, but there were still some differences on each other’s “core demands” that they were seeking to narrow.

“It can be said that we are now in the sprint phase, and both negotiating teams are working towards the goal of reaching an agreement within the deadline, but some problems are still quite complicated to resolve,” said one Chinese official familiar with the situation.

The United States has accused Beijing of forcing U.S. companies doing business in China to share their technology with local partners and hand over intellectual property secrets. China denies it engages in such practices.

Trump administration officials also object to non-tariff barriers in China, including industrial subsidies, regulations, business licensing procedures, product standards reviews and other practices that they say keep U.S. goods out of China or give an unfair advantage to domestic firms.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has pushed for China to open its financial services markets to more foreign firms, including major credit card companies Visa and MasterCard, which have waited years for China to make good on promises to allow them to operate there.

On currency, U.S. officials including Mnuchin have warned China against devaluing its yuan to gain a competitive advantage after the Chinese currency weakened significantly against the dollar last year, partly counteracting Trump’s tariffs.

The two sides were discussing an enforcement mechanism for the deal, the source said. Reuters reported last month that the United States was pushing for regular reviews of China’s progress on pledged trade reforms and could reinstate tariffs if it deems Beijing has violated the agreement.

The parties also were looking at a 10-item list of ways that China could reduce its trade surplus with the United States, including by buying agricultural produce, energy and goods such as semiconductors, according to two other sources familiar with the talks.

CLOCK IS TICKING

Time is running short ahead of the March 1 deadline to resolve the dispute or see U.S. tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods rise from 10 percent to 25 percent. Trump said on Tuesday he thought China had an incentive to move swiftly.

“I think they’re trying to move fast so that doesn’t happen,” he told reporters in the Oval Office, while not ruling out the possibility of extending the deadline.

Lower-level officials held a round of talks in Washington on Tuesday and Wednesday. They will be joined on Thursday by the top-level negotiators, led by U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He.

One senior Chinese government official familiar with the talks said that extending the deadline was an option, though both sides were trying to reach an agreement before March 1 and any extension would not be too long.

It is possible the talks won’t resolve all the differences, and it will be up to the two heads of state to make a final decision, the official said.

(Reporting by Jeff Mason in Washington; Additional reporting by Michael Martina, Jing Xu, Muyu Xu and Martin Pollard in BEIJING and David Lawder in WASHINGTON; Editing by Simon Webb, Sonya Hepinstall and James Dalgleish)