Dec. 10----Teterboro-based Dassault builds on two years of rising orders.
Teterboro Airport-based Dassault Falcon Business Jet Corp. is on the rebound from an astoundingly steep drop in sales in 2009 and 2010, when cancellations of orders outnumbered new sales, its chief executive said last week.
"This crisis has been the most severe we have seen," John G. Rosanvallon said on Friday in an interview at his office. The company, part of Dassault Aviation of France, has been selling private jets for 40 years in Bergen County.
Like many private jet companies, Dassault Falcon was flying high in 2007, when it received purchase orders for 212 aircraft amid giant payouts in bonuses to Wall Street bankers and increased demand for large-cabin, long-range business jets in emerging markets like India and China.
That number fell in 2008, to 115, with a steep drop at the end of the year when financial markets froze, Rosanvallon said. In 2009, the company took only 27 new orders while being hammered with 190 cancellations.
The canceled orders continued in 2010, with a net loss of nine as the business-jet operator NetJets Aviation, owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway and one of Dassault's biggest customers -- canceled orders for 65 jets that were to be delivered after 2014.
But last year the company, which employs about 500 people at Teterboro, netted 36 new orders, and this year is on track for a net gain of more than 50.
"Things are clearly getting better," said Rosanvallon, who joined Dassault in 1975. "Our goal is to sell 70 to 80 aircraft."
The planes are built in France and the interiors are completed in Little Rock, Ark. At Teterboro, the company houses customer service, marketing and sales departments as well as executive offices. It also operates a hangar for demonstration aircraft and manages a $300 million inventory of spare parts. Its aircraft range in price from about $25 million to more than $50 million for the "fly-by-wire" large-cabin 7X, which has digital controls similar to those of Dassault Aviations' fighter jets.
Makes bigger jets
Manufacturers known for smaller aircraft, like Cessna and Hawker Beechcraft, suffered more in the downturn than did Falcon, whose primary rivals are Gulfstream and Bombardier.
Hawker Beechcraft, which was saddled with debt when Goldman Sachs and Onex Corp. bought it from Raytheon in a 2007 leveraged buy-out, cut thousands of workers the past three years and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in May. It expects to emerge from bankruptcy next year with a narrower focus, mainly making piston and turboprop planes.
"The recession was particularly hard felt in our industry. It was practically a depression," said Brian Foley, an aviation consultant in Sparta.
New jet deliveries hit a trough last year although the business now seems to be on the mend, he said.
"From this point on we expect deliveries to pick up until the next cyclical downturn, which could start in 2017," Foley said.
Until 2005, Dassault Falcon's sales in the United States represented two-thirds of its total sales, Rosanvallon said. But since then, the international market has grown as U.S. sales stalled. International sales now account for 70 percent of Dassault Falcon's business, Rosanvallon said.
Dassault Falcon recently announced the opening of a subsidiary in Beijing, and it will have three demonstration aircraft at a trade show that begins on Tuesday in Dubai.
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Copyright 2012 - The Record (Hackensack, N.J.)
