YAr only Interests no buying
JF-17 Thunder showed exemplary flights over the Dubai airport within the air show. Members of the Azerbaijani delegation also watched the flights.
Reminding about the discussions held with Azerbaijan up to now, the company officials said that the discussions have not entered the phase of purchase and sale yet. Now the company is executing the orders of the Pakistan’s Air Forces, the export to Azerbaijan can be realized in the nearest years. The sides determined the annual amount of the order.
Given that the excerpts are from Azeri news sources, that should answer your question. Other people are
DEFINITELY interested in the JF17.
Why wouldn't they be, this offers superb modern capabilities at a 3rd of the price. Imagine that, even after the Russians doubled the SU-30's price from <50 Million US$ to nearly 100 million US$ - our 20-30 million US$ JF17 still enjoys the advantage in BVR engagement. With SD10B's greater range, we get to lock first and shoot first. Before the SU-30 with it's gynormous airframe and huge RCS even manages to come within range to achieve lock-on. Pretty ironic, given how they bragged about their BVR advantage for years. The SD10B is a very recent development, R-77 is an older design(and India's are even older, their inventory of R-77s dates back to the mid 90's), and China's investment in this area is much larger than what Russia is able to, in this area, so the advantage Chinese frontline weapons enjoy is only likely to increase. Perhaps Russia should double prices again, because India loves the jet so much. Then, Indians could really criticize us on JF17's cheaper price.
So it is clear and evident that our airforce is focusing on building it's own inventory first.
This bird is our main workhorse, and not some export variant with weapons that require Uncle Sam's blessing to function. I know we're anxious to see sales, but I appreciate the foresighted approach they're taking. India has a tendency to get antsy atleast once, often twice, per decade. Everytime we're weak or vulnerable, they come up with an excuse to come to our borders(they came to our borders after 9/11 when the US was pressurizing us to help invade Afg - excuse was some attack on the parliament, and again in 2008 with these Mumbai attacks - excuse/evidence was laughably pathetic, when we were diplomatically cornered already). They even did this back when we were vulnerable and Soviet armour was lined up on the western front, Gen Zia-ul Haq's "cricket diplomacy" and those discrete threats deterred them then. Next time some SU-30 tries to come across the border with bombs loaded, like after Mumbai, we likely won't have an F-16 with missile-lock convincing it to retreat, but likely JF17s or J-10s.
So, they're clearly building up numbers before the prospect of foreign sales arises
. The Azeri news-site itself mentions their interest, as well as saying that Azerbaijan can only get this "in the nearest years", because the company(PAC) is executing orders for the PAF. They might even be one of our first customers to get this, "in the nearest years". The Pakistani Defence Minister also went on record stating that the PAC could not build up numbers fast enough to satisfy our needs(PAF is pretty quality-conscious, they probably don't want to compromise on quality-control just to churn out more JF17s).
I believe they're trying to generate alot of interest for the JF17, so when Pakistan has like 100+ JF17s and our assembly lines have expanded enough to build for local as well as for export, there'd be enough demand to keep churning out JF17s for years to come.