Was the Indo-US nuclear deal a game- changer for Boeing India?
The big impetus to defence came when we, along with the US government, were working on the civilian nuclear deal with the Indian government. You must remember that the Indian government had not purchased any defence equipment from any US company since 1985. The breakthrough came this January, when we sold eight P8i version maritime surveillance airborne systems. As we do more defence deals in India, we will also have to do a lot of offsets. For instance, in the P8i deal, we are doing around $600 million of offsets. There are other needs in India such as the transport airplane C-17, which we displayed in the recent Bangalore air show. We also have a military side to our product line—Apache helicopters and Chinooks, which can be used for transport and attack. We would like to build on the foundation, based on what we have done on the commercial side, to work on the military side. Importantly, we can leverage our defence and commercial units to perform better than others. We now have a Bo
