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Airbus and the Chinese government announced Thursday that they had selected Tianjin, a port near Beijing, as the site for a planned assembly plant to produce Airbus A320 narrow-body jets. Airbus cautioned that a final decision to go ahead with the project would not be made until the end of September. But the selection of Tianjin is the latest in a series of steps by Airbus toward establishing its first aircraft assembly operation outside Europe, with the goal of catching up with Boeing in the fast- growing Chinese market.
Airbus said in a terse statement that, assuming that the factory was built, the assembly line would start producing planes in 2008 and reach a rate of four aircraft a month by 2011. The Chinese government has been eager to attract a Western aircraft factory, and a statement from the official Xinhua press agency took an exuberant tone. "In 2008, the first planes will leave the factory, go into service and fly up into the blue sky," the agency said. In an extensive report in Chinese that caught Airbus by surprise, Xinhua also described numerous details of the planned factory. The local government has agreed to build an extra runway at its airport for test flights. The factory is to employ 1,000 people and have an initial investment of $630 million for the assembly line itself, with $375 million to $630 million in additional investments. The selection of Tianjin, 96 kilometers, or 60 miles, from Beijing in northeastern China, is a setback for Xian, the capital of Shaanxi Province in central China and the country's best-known center of aircraft manufacturing. Chen Deming, governor of Shaanxi province, said in an interview in April that the province was trying hard to lure Airbus. But Chen also expressed concern that Airbus mainly wanted to find a seaport to make it easier to bring in parts for assembly. "Unless there is a tectonic movement, Xian won't have a coastline, but we have other advantages," like a skilled work force, he said. Central Tianjin is on the banks of the Haihe River, about 30 kilometers from Bohai Bay in the Pacific. But the city has built a much larger port next to the bay. Xinhua said the site for the plant was 130 kilometers from Beijing and about 30 kilometers from central Tianjin, suggesting that it is likely to be near the ocean. Chinese passenger and cargo traffic has been growing at a rate of nearly 20 percent a year for a quarter century, making China a hotly contested market. By Keith Bradsher Source: International Herald Tribune
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