Expects To Bounce Back After Two Years As Number Two

Pop Quiz: When you're faced with stiff competition in the marketplace and your fighting for sales supremacy, what do you do?

Cut prices. Offer discounts. Make sure the discounts are bigger than those offered by the competition.

Of course, there are some who might point out that's how the airline industry as a whole got to where it is today. Still, that's Boeing's strategy to beat Airbus on new plane deliveries this year and, to that end, Boeing is so confident that it's revised its delivery forecast.

"We'll beat them this year," Boeing VP for Commercial Sales Scott Carson told Bloomberg News. "The trick will be keeping momentum going past the usual peaks."

Boeing has already forecast the delivery of some 320 planes in 2005. But in just the first quarter of this year, the company got 197 commitments for new aircraft -- many of them from India and China. With that in mind, the company now suggests, but hasn't yet officially forecast, sales of up to 385 this year. That puts Boeing's forecast right in line with the one from Airbus.

If Boeing and Airbus do try to out-discount each other, it can only mean good news for the world's airlines. Many are hurting... a pain made all the worse by soaring fuel prices.

Discounting to the extent that enables Boeing to alter its forecast is also a double-edged sword. So said Suzanne Betts, an airline analyst for New York's Argus Research Group. "Airlines are strapped for cash. If Boeing comes down on pricing to attract more domestic orders, that could be a problem down the road for profitability."

Carson wouldn't get specific about numbers in a revised forecast. And he seems to know that this is a game in which the players tempt fate.

"Price competition is as intense as I can imagine right now, and it continues to intensify," Carson told Bloomberg. "When we win an order, Airbus comes back harder with price on the next competition."

FMI: www.boeing.com, www.airbus.com