Did Boeing Just About Sew up South Korea's Fighter Competition?

Boeing’s bid in the 8.3 trillion won ($7.4 billion) tender to supply South Korea with 60 fighter aircraft was the only one below the price ceiling set by the country’s arms procurement agency, sources close to the process said on Monday.

A final decision is not expected until mid-September, the sources said, but the price submitted by the U.S. company appears to be a significant step towards winning the contract.

Boeing is pitching the latest variant of its F-15 fighter, dubbed the F-15 Silent Eagle, against the Eurofighter consortium’s Typhoon and Lockheed Martin’s F-35 stealth jet.

South Korea’s Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA), which led the assessment of the fighters, said on Friday that at least one bid, which it did not identify, came within its overall budget.

The decision on one of the world’s most closely-watched military tenders will be made by a committee chaired by South Korea’s defense minister after DAPA submits its final evaluation of the three fighters next month.

DAPA will score the bids on a fixed set of criteria, though Korean law prevents the government from signing a contract that exceeds the allotted budget.

“We will conduct a comprehensive evaluation on all three models,” DAPA spokesman Baek Youn-hyeong said. “But ... only parties with under-budget bids will be subject for final selection.”

And here:

European aerospace consortium EADS has been eliminated from a bid to provide fighter jets worth $7.3 billion to South Korea due to a failure to meet some requirements, a report said Sunday.

The Eurofighter was dropped from the bid also sought by US company Boeing after the South’s military found that the EADS proposal did not meet its key demands, Yonhap news agency said.

It cited an unidentified official at the Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA). A spokesman for DAPA was not immediately available for comment.

“A problem was found in the proposal document of one of two final bidders,” Yonhap quoted the DAPA official as saying, adding the troubled bidder was known to be EADS.

“The company in question was deemed unfit (to join the final bid),” the official was quoted as saying.