Recently, ICBC and Banque National de Paris (BNP) jointly arranged an operating lease project financing of USD 34 million to purchase a Boeing 737-700 airplane for China International Airlines Limited. ICBC and BNP played an equal role as the co-leader of syndicate banks for this project. It is introduced that this is currently the first operating lease financing project for foreign airplanes arranged by a domestic commercial bank in China.

Person in charge from the related department of ICBC introduced that the cooperation of ICBC and BNP as one of the lead banks to complete this first foreign airplane operating lease project not only broke the monopoly of foreign banks in the sector, but also showed a big innovative attempt of ICBC to adjust its airplane financing service products.

In recent years, along with global big airline companies' continuous expansion of airplanes, they also posed higher requirements in further optimizing their financial quality, circumventing airplane residual value risk and making adjustments to their fleet structure. Based on this situation, operating lease financing is a mainstream and also the first choice for world major air companies to purchase new airplanes. Current statistics shows that over 30% of global airplane financing market is already operating lease financing. Moreover, operating lease financing has long been monopolized by foreign financial institutions owing to its prudence and complexity in involving foreign trading entity, project structure and laws of other countries when compared to traditional financing. The smooth completion of this project marked the success of ICBC to break the monopoly of foreign banks in airplane lease financing. It is also a significant progress for China commercial banks in organizing airplane operating lease financing which is a most competitive airplane-financing product with greatest potential.