Aircraft manufacturer Boeing will make its first major sale to China in nearly a decade with an order for 200 planes, President Donald Trump told reporters Friday as he flew back from his summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, Trump said China reserved the right to buy as many as 750 Boeing aircraft as part of a deal reached during the summit. The White House did not specify the types of planes or provide any other details.
Neither the Chinese government nor Boeing issued statements confirming the purchase agreement. A Boeing spokesperson on Friday referred questions to the White House. The deal, if finalized, would mark a significant breakthrough in a market that was once central to the U.S. aerospace company’s long-term growth.
Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg was among a large group of American CEOs who joined Trump during the president’s trip to Beijing, seeking to sell products and services to China.
Trump said the potential aircraft deal also would benefit General Electric, which he said would supply 400 to 450 engines to China. GE Aerospace Chairman and CEO H. Lawrence Culp also joined the president on his trip. The company did not immediately comment on the agreement.
While there were some hopes that the summit would result in concrete announcements of deals, the trip ended with a lot of uncertainty about what the two sides agreed on, said Bonnie Glaser, managing director of the Indo-Pacific program at the German Marshall Fund.
“I think we really have to wait until we hear numbers from Boeing or from the Chinese,” Glaser told a media briefing Friday, saying there had been little concrete information about any trade agreements from the summit, including on Chinese purchases of U.S. exports such as soybeans, liquefied natural gas and beef. “All that we have is really what the president has told the world that China has agreed to.”
Last month, Ortberg expressed confidence that any broad U.S.-China trade agreement to emerge when Trump and Xi met 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 told investors.
Since Trump’s return to the White House for his second term, his administration has made Boeing a focus of its plans to revive U.S. manufacturing. A visit to the Middle East a year ago culminated in major aircraft agreements, including a Qatar Airways order for up to 210 Boeing jets in what the planemaker described at the time as its largest-ever widebody aircraft order. Saudi Arabia also placed commercial jetliner orders during the trip.
Other major Boeing agreements have followed meetings between Trump and foreign leaders. In August, Korean Air formalized a roughly $50 billion deal to buy more than 100 Boeing aircraft, spare engines and long-term maintenance services during South Korean President Lee Jae Myung’s visit to Washington. The following month, a day after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan met with Trump in Washington, Turkish Airlines said it planned to add 225 Boeing aircraft to its fleet.
In another win for Boeing, the biennial Dubai Air Show opened in November with hometown airline Emirates ordering 65 of Boeing’s upcoming 777-9 aircraft. Days later, FlyDubai, the lower-cost sister carrier of Emirates, announced it had ordered 75 additional Boeing 737 MAX aircraft.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, roughly a third of the narrowbody airliners Boeing delivered went to China. But the company’s business there plummeted as U.S.-China relations soured.
China also was the first country to ground the 737 Max in 2019 after two of the then-new models crashed less than five months apart in Indonesia and Ethiopia, killing 346 people. Chinese airlines did not resume Max flights until January 2023, much later than carriers in many other countries.
Ortberg took over as Boeing’s CEO in 2024, a calamitous year for the company. In January of that year, a panel known as a door plug blew off a 737 Max shortly after takeoff from Portland, Oregon. Boeing faced mounting financial pressure as it came under intensifying scrutiny over alleged production and quality failures.
Months later, the U.S. Justice Department revived a criminal case against Boeing tied to the two fatal Max crashes, although prosecutors later reached an agreement with Boeing to dismiss the case, committing the company to an additional $1.1 billion in fines, compensation for victims’ families and internal safety and quality improvements.
Then an eight-week strike stretching through the fall by machinists who assemble the 737 Max in Washington state disrupted production and added to the company’s financial strain.
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Associated Press writers Bill Barrow in Atlanta and Kelvin Chan in London contributed to this story.
