Aircraft manufacturer Airbus will reduce its production and deliveries by around 40% over the next two years, and could make tens of thousands of employees redundant in the process.
“We cannot disconnect ourselves from developments among airlines,” Airbus senior executive Guillaume Faury said Monday in the German newspaper Die Welt. The company lost €481 million in the first quarter of 2020.
Airbus had been talking about reducing production by around 30%, but this forecast has now been raised to 40%. This reduction is expected as early as next year.
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The manufacturer will be building around 40 A320 aircraft per month. Many aircraft that have already been assembled are currently parked, according to Faury. Airlines are not taking up the offer at the moment because of the coronavirus pandemic. The situation could last until 2021 before production and deliveries resume at normal levels.
The company will proceed with a wave of redundancies. Speculation is that around 15,000 of the 90,000 jobs in the civil aviation division will be affected. “The security of our future is at stake,” Faury said. However, the company “will leave no stone unturned” when it comes to looking at ways to reduce costs without firing staff, Faury said.
Airbus expects demand for mid-sized aircraft to pick up more quickly than wide-bodied plains, for which they expect demand to “remain low for the next five years, as there was already an oversupply on the market before the crisis,” though “at some point in time, a major replacement wave for the Boeing 777 and the Airbus A330 is expected, but this is still a long way off.”
Jason Spinks
The Brussels Times
