Journalists inside the cabin of the Bombardier CS100 aircraft one day before the opening of the 51st Paris Air Show at Le Bourget airport near Paris on June 14. Built to hold 108 to 160 seats, the CSeries competes with Boeing and Airbus’s smallest jets.

Bloomberg/Montreal

Bombardier boasts new assets in its quest to find buyers for the struggling CSeries jet: a revamped sales team and even better performance than advertised.
While the Paris Air Show in June produced no sales, Bombardier buffed the CSeries’ image with flights at the industry’s biggest annual expo. Now, drumming up orders will mean targeting owners of similar, ageing planes and getting current customers to firm up options into purchases, according to analysts including AirInsight’s Addison Schonland.
“Paris was a critical milestone,” said Chris Murray, an AltaCorp Capital analyst who attended the event. “Some airline guys saw the plane for the first time, and now there is a lot more confidence in the timeline and the actual performance of the aircraft. It’s almost like we hit Day Zero of the sales cycle at the air show.”
With its stock price slumping to the lowest since 2004, Montreal-based Bombardier can use a reboot. The plane maker last won a CSeries sale in September and has almost a third of the backlog tied to buyers that no longer need it or want new terms. The jet is more than two years late and $1bn over budget.
Bombardier is betting the CSeries can crack the duopoly on single-aisle jets held by Boeing Co and Airbus Group SE — and produce as much as $8bn in annual revenue by decade’s end. Chief Executive Officer Alain Bellemare, who joined in February, brought in industry veterans including Fred Cromer, who now heads the commercial aircraft arm, and Colin Bole, the unit’s senior vice president of sales.
“Their new sales people are leasing people,” said Schonland, a Baltimore-based partner at aviation consultant AirInsight. “They know the fleet of every airline.”
Even with the CSeries’ stalled commercial debut creating more time to win deals, the 243 firm orders are short of a target of 300 by the time it’s in service, now set for 2016.
Sales efforts “advanced on a number of fronts” as a result of meetings in Paris, Bombardier spokeswoman Marianella de la Barrera said in a telephone interview. “With the improved performance we feel we are in a much better position to capture opportunities.”
That optimism has yet to carry over to the shares, whose 12% drop since the air show ended last month is the most among Canadian industrial companies. Wednesday’s C$2.18 close was the lowest since December 2004.
Built to hold 108 to 160 seats, the CSeries competes with Boeing and Airbus’s smallest jets. Schonland cited possible sales targets including Latam Airlines Group, an operator of Airbus’s A319, and Qantas Airways’ QantasLink, which flies the Boeing 717.
One challenge is which customers will even take the planes. Indianapolis-based Republic Airways Holdings, which ordered 40, has changed its business model and doesn’t need them, while Russian lessor Ilyushin Finance Co said in April that it wanted to renegotiate its 32-plane agreement.
Other buyers may be open to converting options or firming up letters of intent.