Brazil’s economic boom is providing much-needed support to the worldwide private jet sector, which was savaged by last year’s global downturn, manufacturers exhibiting their aircraft in Sao Paulo said.

Latin America’s powerhouse is helping to shake off a disastrous 2009 that saw sales of executive jets slump amid a fire sale of second-hand planes on the market and a rush by purchasing companies to cancel contracts.

“I think it’s going to be a slow recovery but it will be a recovery, because the demand’s there. One of the reasons why we’re here in Brazil is because this is a very, very strong market,” Joseph Lombardo, the president of business jet maker Gulfstream, told AFP.

He was speaking at the start of a three-day Latin American Business Aviation Conference and Exhibition event showcasing more than 50 executive jets from leading manufacturers including Gulfsteam of the United States, Canada’s Bombardier, France’s Dassault, and Brazil’s own Embraer.

“The downturn was very hard,” eviscerating an industry that had been soaring before the crisis on corporate demand for small planes costing up to $60 million, Mr Lombardo said.

Before the crisis, in 2008, a total of $22 billion worth of executive jets were sold.

Last year, that shrank to $17 billion – and predictions are that the industry will not recover to pre-crisis levels for another five to seven years.

“We haven’t had the wave of cancelled contracts we had in 2009 in particular, but we still aren’t in a phase of a strong and real recovery except in some niches in certain markets, including the Brazilian market,” said the head of France’s Dassault Falcon executive jet company, Jean Rosenvallon.

He said that, with US and European buyers of small jets still being miserly, purchasers in the BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India and China – were the main sources of growth.

Dassault Falcon was the leader in the Brazilian market for executive jets costing more than $30 million, Mr Rosenvallon said.

Although saddled with a strong euro cost base that hurt competitivity against dollar-reliant rivals, Dassault Falcon was looking to aggressively push into the BRIC markets.

“The one that’s really taken off in the past one or two years, and which will maybe be explosive for us, is China,” he said.

But Embraer is proving a resilient competitor, especially in its home market. The Brazilian company boasted that its market share grew from five percent last year to 14 per cent this year.

“Latin America and Brazil in particular, they’re doing very well. In spite of the economic crisis, the Brazilian economy had a relatively mild contraction due to the crisis in 2008. And this year we will have very large GDP growth,” said Claudio Galdo Camilier, the vice president for market intelligence in Embraer’s executive jet division.

“The business jet market has a very high correlation with the economic activity, so what we’re experiencing here in Brazil is a good situation when compared to more mature markets like North America and Europe,” he said.

Roger Whyte, senior vice president for sales and marketing for US manufacturer Cessna, told AFP the number of second-hand planes that had been depressing the market declining.

“So we think that we have gone through the bottom and now things are starting to pick up again and we’ll start seeing growth coming towards the end of this year and into next year,” he said.