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Airbus Power 8 restructuring plan presented
By Sebastian Steinke
On 28 February, Airbus boss Louis Gallois presented the Power 8 restructuring plan. The consequences for the entire company are far-reaching: within four years 3700 manufacturing jobs are to be lost in Germany, 3200 manufacturing jobs in France, 1600 manufacturing jobs in Britain and 400 manufacturing jobs in Spain as well as 1100 jobs at the company's headquarters in Toulouse. On top of that, all plants not deemed to be part of the company's narrowly defined “core business”, such as Méaulte, Nordenham and Filton, are to be taken over and operated by partner companies. A third category of plants, including Laupheim, Varel and Saint-Nazaire-Ville, are to be sold entirely.
For both employees and suppliers this is bitter news. After all, they are being forced to pick up the tab for management failings at a time of full order books and record production rates. Airbus announced that it intends to handle the job cuts as far as possible without compulsory redundancies and that the cuts will affect staff and subcontractors in equal measure.
A build-up of reforms has been threatening to paralyse Airbus: wiring problems in the A380, the costs of the A350 programme turning out to be substantially higher than expected, the costly transition to carbon-fibre composites, the huge financial requirements for future programmes and, not least, the lasting decline of the dollar. For every ten cent fall in the dollar, Airbus loses a billion at the end of the year.
However, Gallois' most series admission, despite years of protestations to the contrary, is that full Airbus integration is still some way off. Only now is Airbus finally to get a uniform, cross-border organisational structure based on competence centres rather than one based on national subsidiaries, which have not always pulled in the same direction in the past.
It is to be hoped that the current crisis comes as a salutary shock on Airbus: that decisions in future are taken more quickly, objectively and transparently, without any remaining traces of national vanity; that the company becomes lean, decisive and profitable; and that its focus finally returns to aircraft-building and its customers.
It is also to be hoped that the company's highly skilled staff, although they may lose their Airbus jobs, can continue to find a market for their skills in more auspicious circumstances, and that whole regions do not lose their aerospace industry. Successful examples of spin-offs such as the former Boeing plant Spirit Aero Systems or the former DASA subsidiary Pfalz Flugzeugwerke give rise to hope. And when the plants are sold, the investors will certainly be happy because they will also be buying full order books. Things were very different with DASA's Dolores initiative in the mid-90s. At that time, plants were closed in order to reduce capacity.
With the Power 8 decisions to establish the fuselage and cabin competence centres in Germany, and in the medium term to move final assembly of the entire standard fuselage family, including that of the A320's successor, to Hamburg, we can be hopeful that a framework is now in place, despite all the rigours that now lie before us, that will secure the long-term future of the aerospace industry in Germany.
From page 6 FLUG REVUE 4/2007
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