Boeing Co is working on a verbal agreement to sell 80 of its 737 planes to China, which agreed to buy 70 of the jetliners in November. The combined purchase, valued at US$8.6 billion at list prices, would be the largest group of planes Boeing has sold to China.

Airbus SAS, the world's largest maker of commercial airplanes, may post more than US$20 billion of accumulated sales in China in the next 20 years as it prepares to assemble planes in the country, company President Gustav Humbert said.

Airbus is evaluating four cities in China for putting together A320 planes. The company, based in Toulouse, France, plans to make as many as four A320s a month in China by 2010, producing the first aircraft in 2008, Humbert said.

(China Daily February 23, 2006)