By Jamie Freed and Allison Lampert
(Reuters) - Cash-strapped Chinese conglomerate HNA Group has put up for sale its luxurious $300-million-plus Boeing 787 corporate "Dream Jet" with registration "2-DEER", say six aviation industry sources familiar with the matter.
The 40-seat jet, used for charters as well as by top HNA officials, recently carried Cambodian president Hun Sen to the U.N. General Assembly in New York and undertaken flights between Brazzaville, capital of the Republic of Congo, and Beijing, on dates coinciding with a visit to China by President Denis Sassou Nguesso.
Under pressure from Beijing, aviation-to-hotels group HNA has in 2018 sold real estate, stakes in overseas companies and aviation-related assets after a $50-billion acquisition spree in recent years.
One of the industry sources said HNA was attempting to sell the fleet in its wholly-owned private Deer Jet division and then shut it down.
It could prove difficult to attract close to the purchase price for the 40-seat 787, due to the limited market for widebody private jets, which are usually bought by governments or billionaires who prefer to select their own interior design, two of the sources told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
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A 787-8 business jet has a list price of $232 million, but the interiors typically cost $90 to $170 million, according to Boeing.
The interiors of the HNA jet, registered as "2-DEER" in Guernsey, dubbed the "Dream Jet" and featuring a 17-hour non-stop range, took 2.5 years to complete, according to the website of HNA's wholly-owned private jet division Deer Jet.
"A lot of the large aircraft have to go for two-thirds of the (original) price or half the price because whoever buys it will have different thinking on interiors," one of the sources said. "Nobody is going to spend that money and sit in somebody else's bed with a different cushion. They want what they want."
Some of the fittings are by designers such as Baccarat and Fendi, according to a Deer Jet tweet in 2016. A brochure for charter clients seen by Reuters calls 2-DEER a "flying home" with 26 lie-flat beds.
The jet was put on the market in late July, after the death of HNA Co-Chairman Wang Jian in an accidental fall in France, said another source, adding that Deer Jet's Beijing office is open to serious offers and has not assigned a jet broker.
HNA and Deer Jet declined to comment on 2-DEER. They were not immediately available for comment on whether the rest of the fleet was for sale after Bloomberg on Thursday first reported that Deer Jet was looking to sell "dozens of jets".
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Since January, HNA has sold or agreed to sell more than $20 billion worth of assets, including real estate in Sydney, New York and Hong Kong, according to Reuters calculations and media reports.
"We do understand that as they are doing the corporate restructuring they are intending to sell the 787," one of the sources said. "It is a very expensive aircraft, due to the operational costs."
The HNA jet had originally been owned by Dell Technologies Inc founder and chairman Michael Dell, one of the sources said. A spokesman for Dell's private interests declined to comment.
Boeing said it had sold 15 787 business jets, with 12 delivered to date. Two other Boeing 787 business jets globally are also for sale, sources said.
HNA's 787 was unveiled publicly in 2016 at a European business jet show and has been available for VIP charters, including for world leaders, at a cost of around $74,000 an hour.
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen used 2-DEER to visit the United Nations headquarters in New York as well as Brussels, Istanbul and Geneva over the last month, a Cambodian government spokesman confirmed on Wednesday.
The spokesman had no comment on whether the government was interested in buying the jet, which used the flight number KHM01 for the leader's flights, according to flight tracking website FlightRadar24.
In September, the jet flew from Brazzaville to China as CONGO01, coinciding with a visit by the African country's President Denis Sassou Nguesso, according to FlightRadar24 and media reports of his whereabouts. The Republic of Congo government was unable to immediately provide comment.
(Reporting by Jamie Freed in Singapore and Allison Lampert in Montreal; Additional reporting by Eric M. Johnson in Seattle, Kane Wu in Hong Kong, Stella Qiu in Beijing, Prak Chan Thul in Phnom Penh and Juliette Jabkhiro in Dakar; Editing by Jennifer Hughes and Clarence Fernandez)