Cebu Pacific to buy 7 Airbus jets for $812M

The Philippines’ largest airline Cebu Pacific is ordering seven Airbus A321ceo aircraft in a deal worth $812 million to meet growing domestic and regional demand, the airline said Wednesday.

Cebu Pacific, best known for its budget flights, said in a statement the new planes would start arriving next March.

“There is… the need to increase our current capacity to meet growing domestic and regional network demand, thus the A321ceo order,” chief finance officer Andrew Huang was quoted in a statement as saying.

The A321ceo order comes on top of an existing order for 32 Airbus A321neo aircraft which were originally scheduled to arrive from September 2017 to 2021.

However these deliveries have been pushed back till late-2018 until 2022 due to delays with the engines selected to power them, the statement said.

“The aircraft will enable us to increase capacity on popular routes, while at the same time benefiting from the lowest operating costs in this size category,” said Cebu Pacific president Lance Gokongwei.

Cebu Pacific, which started operations in 1996, boasts a 61-plane fleet of which 48 are Airbus planes. It flies both domestic and international routes.