Dubai Aerospace Enterprise, the Middle East’s biggest aircraft lessor, agreed to buy and then lease out three freighter planes to Russian cargo airline AirBridgeCargo.
Under the arrangement, DAE’s leasing division DAE Capital will purchase three new Boeing 777 freighter aircraft from the manufacturerand lease them to Moscow-based AirBridgeCargo, which is owned by Russian carrier Volga Dnepr Airlines.
The three aircraft will be the first of this type to enter AirBridgeCargo’s fleet in 2020, the parties said in a statement on Wednesday. “DAE Capital is the world’s largest lessor of 777F aircraft, and our long-term experience with this aircraft type helped in executing this agreement swiftly,” said DAE’s chief executive Firoz Tarapore.
DAE currently has 15 owned and committed Boeing 777 freighters.
“These aircraft will support our strategy of broader fleet diversity and modernisation, allowing us to deliver a more cost-efficient product to our customers,” added Aleksey Isaikin, president of Volga-Dnepr Group.
The deal will be facilitated in part through pre-delivery payment (PDP) financing – a type of short-to-medium term secured loan usually made available to an aircraft purchaser before the planes are delivered.
DAE more than doubled its annual profit for the full-year 2018 due to gains from the disposal of jets and a rise in revenue-generating aircraft.
The lessor made $372.9 million (Dh1.37 billion) in profit attributable to shareholders in 2018, up from $172.6m the previous year, it said in February. Annual revenue jumped 70 per cent year-on-year to $1.4bn.
