Spain, Belgium poised to be next F-35 buyers
At last week’s Avalon Airshow in Melbourne, Australia, Lockheed Martin’s F-35 program director said the company is looking to ship more F-35 joint strike fighters to European clients, The Indian Express reported.
“We are starting to see other customers think about the F-35 being added to their fleet,” Jeff Babione, an executive at Lockheed, told reporters in Australia. Finland may be interested in the F-35 as well, an unofficial source told The Indian Express.
“We are talking to several other countries,” in addition to the 10 US allies who have already bought or agreed to purchase the joint strike fighter, Babione noted. Australia, Canada, Denmark, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, the UK, and Turkey have already entered the cadre of “global participants,” according to Lockheed’s corporate F-35 website. It is not clear whether prospective clients were put off by the inability of Australia’s F-35s to fly through lightning.
Lockheed Martin argues that increasing the number of global F-35 shipments will help reduce the cost of the fifth-generation fighter for all parties involved, due to economies of scale. Babione, adopting the legacy marketing strategy encapsulated in the phrase “the more you buy the more you save,” called for the US and its allies to step up their yearly purchases — to help Lockheed make the goal of an $80 million jet by 2020 a reality.
“It is actually a very reasonable target,” the F-35 program director effused, “but it is going to take cooperation in changing the way we buy aircraft.” Specifically, the company wants lucrative, multi-year government contracts, which provide steady streams of revenue that Lockheed executives can tout during earnings calls to shareholders. Lockheed says publicly that three-year bulk orders can help drive down costs as the manufacturer will be able to order parts in larger quantities. “Maybe in the future you are talking about a multi-year [deal] and you could do a five year multi-year and increase the savings.”
