China’s growing role in global aviation and aerospace is spreading to finance, with one of the cash-rich country’s largest financial institutions targeting airlines as a growth market for wider financial services, including debt and equity investment. The ambitions of that institution, Bank of China, have become evident from its takeover last year of Singapore Aircraft Leasing Enterprise, which it has now renamed BOC Aviation.

Much of China’s civil aircraft industry will go into publicly listed companies, one of them open to foreign shareholders, under plans by aerospace conglomerate Avic I. As the industry prepares to compete with Western firms, the reorganization should help raise efficiency by concentrating work into companies that must answer to non-government owners. And it will push forward the separation of commercial business from key military work, the melding of which has been an obstacle in the pursuit of foreign contracts.

From an owner’s or manufacturer’s perspective, now is as good a time as any to sign a lease or book an order, according to the view of Martin, who expects supply of commercial aircraft neither to ease nor tighten significantly until rising production rates finally put enough into service to exceed the strong demand of the past few years. For the moment, conditions remain outstanding for owners.