The Boeing Co. secured a 200-aircraft order from China — its first major sale there in nearly a decade — reopening a market that had been virtually closed to the U.S. planemaker since before the COVID-19 pandemic. The company confirmed the order late Friday, shortly after President Donald Trump, returning from his summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, announced the deal to reporters aboard Air Force One.
Boeing did not disclose the aircraft models or the value of the order. “We had a very successful trip to China and accomplished our major goal of reopening the China market to orders for Boeing aircraft,” the company said in a statement, adding that it looked forward to “continually addressing China’s aircraft demand.”
Trump said the agreement also gives China the right to buy up to 750 Boeing planes. He added that General Electric would supply 400 to 450 engines to China under the deal. GE Aerospace, whose chairman and CEO H. Lawrence Culp joined the president on the trip, did not immediately comment.
Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg, who was among the U.S. executives at the Beijing summit, had signaled optimism ahead of the meeting. Last month he told investors that any broad trade agreement emerging from the Trump-Xi talks would be a “meaningful opportunity” for Boeing. “President Trump has been very focused on supporting us in international campaigns, and he’s been very successful in doing that,” Ortberg said.
The China announcement extends a pattern in which major Boeing deals have followed Trump’s direct engagement with foreign leaders. A year ago, a Middle East tour yielded Qatar Airways’ order for up to 210 Boeing jets. In August, Korean Air formalized a roughly $50 billion order for more than 100 aircraft during South Korean President Lee Jae Myung’s visit to Washington. A month later, Turkish Airlines said it planned to add 225 Boeing planes after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan met with Trump in Washington. At the Dubai Air Show in November, Emirates ordered 65 Boeing 777-9s and FlyDubai added 75 737 MAX jets.
Before the pandemic, roughly a third of Boeing’s narrowbody deliveries went to China. But business plummeted as U.S.-China relations deteriorated. China was the first country to ground the 737 MAX after two fatal crashes in 2019, and Chinese airlines did not resume flying the model until January 2023, long after most other carriers.
The summit’s trade outcomes beyond Boeing remained unclear. Bonnie Glaser, managing director of the Indo-Pacific program at the German Marshall Fund, noted that little concrete information had emerged about Chinese purchases of other U.S. exports, including soybeans, liquefied natural gas and beef. “All that we have is really what the president has told the world that China has agreed to,” she said.