US ambassador says Boeing and China may be close to finalizing ‘huge’ aircraft order

Boeing’s stock climbed Tuesday after the American aerospace giant announced a significant jetliner order from Uzbekistan and as optimism builds around a potentially larger aircraft sale to China.

David Perdue, the U.S. ambassador to China, said he thinks negotiations over a possible deal involving Boeing and China are likely in their “final” days or weeks.

“This is a huge order, and it’s very important to the president, very important to Boeing,” Perdue said Tuesday while visiting China with a group of U.S. lawmakers. The ambassador did not give details on the pending transaction.

Perdue’s comments came a day after Boeing said that Uzbekistan Airways would buy up to 22 of its 787 Dreamliners. The Central Asian nation’s flag carrier plans to acquire 14 of the widebody passenger planes and reserved options for adding eight more to the order, Boeing said.

Boeing said the purchase would help the airline expand its international routes, including to the United States, while also “supporting nearly 35,000 U.S. jobs.”

Boeing’s stock price closed 2% higher on Tuesday, bringing its gain for the year so far to 22.2%.

President Donald Trump, in a social media post Monday evening, valued the Uzbekistan Airways deal at over $8 billion but erroneously said the order was for 22,787 planes.

Boeing declined to comment on Trump’s Truth Social post and referred questions to the White House. The White House did not respond to multiple emailed requests from The Associated Press seeking to clarify the numbers that the president cited.

Meanwhile, the potential aircraft deal with China would mark the first sale to the country in years. Although Boeing was still delivering planes to China, its business there plummeted in 2019, when the country became the first to ground all 737 Max planes following two crashes that killed 346 people less than five months apart. Chinese airlines did not resume Max flights until January 2023, much later than other carriers in other countries.

“It’s been a while since Boeing airplanes have been sold here in China,” U.S. Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said in Beijing on Tuesday. “We’d like to get that deal done.”

Boeing refused to comment on a potential order from China or Chinese companies. The commercial and military aircraft maker has been seeking to reverse its fortunes and public image after a calamitous 2024. In January of last year, a panel called a door plug blew off a 737 Max shortly after takeoff from Portland, Oregon.

In July, federal prosecutors revived a criminal fraud charge against the company in connection with the deadly 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019. A nearly eight-week strike by the machinists who assemble the 737 Max and two other Boeing planes in Washington state halted production and further dented the company’s finances.

Since Trump returned to the White House this year, his administration has made Boeing a focus of its plans to revive U.S. manufacturing.

Trump has said he would meet Chinese leader Xi Jinping at a regional summit taking place at the end of October in South Korea and intends to visit China in the “early part of next year,” following a lengthy phone call between the two on Friday.