Bernard Charles, chief executive officer of Dassault Systemes SA. Simon Dawson | Bloomberg | Getty Images

It will take China more than a decade to create a globally competitive, homegrown airplane maker that can go head-to-head with the likes of Boeing and Airbus, according to an industry veteran. Aerospace is a complex industry and it takes time, even for well-established companies, to accumulate knowledge and know-hows to build reliable commercial aircraft, Bernard Charles, vice chairman and CEO of Dassault Systemes, said Thursday. "I think it will take China one or two generations of airplanes to have a truly worldwide competitive product but it's a logical evolution, provided the market size of the country," he told CNBC's Martin Soong at the Boao Forum in China. Dassault Systemes sells software to plane makers that help them digitalize their businesses. The idea is that by embracing more technology into daily operations, those manufacturers can bring down the cost of the jets, use resources more efficiently and ramp up production to meet demand.

At the moment, U.S.-based Boeing and European plane maker Airbus dominate the aircraft manufacturing space along with a number of comparatively smaller players like Brazil's Embraer and Canada's Bombardier.

China ambitions

For its part, Beijing is planning to get in on the action with the state-owned Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (Comac) that's based in Shanghai. That could potentially reduce the country's dependence on the likes of Boeing and Airbus. Currently, Comac has two narrow-body jets, the ARJ21 and C919, and one wide-body plane, the C929, in various stages of production and development. In 2015, the company said it had delivered its first ARJ21 jet to a domestic low-cost carrier. The first C919 jet is expected to be delivered by 2021 and is currently undergoing flight tests. Comac uses Dassault Systemes' products at its major research centers. "The team from the 919 selected our design software," Charles said, referring to the people working on the Comac C919 aircraft. "It shows that this kind of highly sophisticated industry, it's not only a question of toolset or buying digital infrastructure. It's also about organization, it's also about knowledge or know-how."

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