COMAC

COMAC did not grow out of an entrepreneur or a merger of workshops but out of an industrial decision by the Chinese state. The company was constituted on 11 May 2008 in Shanghai with a registered capital of nineteen billion yuan and a shareholder base made up of the aviation corporation AVIC, the aluminium corporation, the Baosteel steel group, Sinochem, the municipal investment company Shanghai Guosheng and the state commission that supervises public enterprises. Its brief was bounded from the start: to design and build large passenger aircraft, above one hundred and fifty seats, a segment in which China bought everything abroad.

The firm did not start from nothing. Its first marketed aircraft was the ARJ21, a seventy to ninety seat regional jet originally developed by AVIC I, which came in as an inherited programme and served as an industrial school: certification, supply chain, after-sales support and dealings with airlines. In November 2024 COMAC rebranded it the C909 to align it with the three-figure 9X9 scheme the company applies to every model from the 919 onwards.

The change of scale came with the C919, a single-aisle twinjet seating up to 168 passengers, conceived explicitly to contest the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 market. It first flew on 5 May 2017, years behind the original schedule, which had pointed to 2016, and entered commercial service in March 2023. By December 2025 the company had accumulated 1,317 orders across its models and delivered 185 aircraft: almost all of the backlog belongs to the C919, with more than a thousand units ordered, while the C909 accounted for most of the deliveries so far. The project portfolio includes the long-range twin-aisle C929, whose first flight has slipped to 2030, the roughly four-hundred-seat C939 and the C949, a supersonic single-aisle design.

The programme leaned on international cooperation from the beginning. In March 2011 COMAC signed a framework agreement for long-term strategic cooperation with Canada's Bombardier, and in June of that year it opened an office in Paris and signed an agreement with Ryanair to cooperate on developing the C919. In 2015 Boeing announced a 737 completion and finishing plant at Zhoushan, and on 22 May 2017 COMAC and Russia's united aircraft corporation created the CRAIC joint venture in Shanghai for the twin-aisle aircraft, with research in Moscow and assembly in Shanghai; the partnership was dropped, and in November 2023 COMAC announced it would develop the aeroplane on its own. That same year it unveiled a collaboration with the battery maker CATL on electric aircraft. On the other side of the ledger, the United States named the company in January 2021 among those controlled by the Chinese military, banning American investment in it; in January 2025 it was added to a Department of Defense list, and in May 2025 export controls were tightened on certain parts previously shipped to it.