Originally Posted by
arcticbull
I think people are giving too much weight to the "50% below list price" from the article. It's come up here on FT a number of times that aircraft usually sell 40-50% below the list price so they can make customers feel good about their orders haha.
I do dare question if an A380 can be built profitably (i.e., recovering development costs) at $150mm. The list price is ~$400m now so 40% off is the old list price. The 40% off $250m was well into the commencement of commercial service IIRC. Might pay the cost of construction but not very much of if any programme profit.
I don't think it's out of the question that they will sell 350-450 planes; they've got 318 firm orders to date and 28 options (for a potential total of 346 planes) thus far. The plane was only introduced to service at the end of 2007 -- for comparison the 777 entered production in the early to mid 90s. I'd say there's pretty good chance they'll come out either even or ahead on this bird.
The sheer size of the a/c limits the number of potential sales. I'd wager the bulk of any further sales would be to replace early frames. Old frames would probably end up cheap at the hands of charters for Hajj and other such travel. The 777 programme has benefited from major product upgrades such as the -300ER and -200LR, and even -200ER. The A380-900 stretch might breath some life and further orders, but the increased size may limit potential sales even more.
I was always curious why they scrapped the 388F; Wikipedia cites "production delays".
Lost all the orders from UPS and FedEx, IIRC. There are no (serious) orders for the A380F. I think UPS and FedEx had a long, hard look at the A380F and backed out when they could.