Monday, December 10, 2007

Toulouse Troubles

There are some well chewed finger nails in the boardroom of Europe's airline aircraft manufacturer Airbus at the moment. They're feeling a mighty big pinch from the dollar's weakness and there's talk by chief executive Tom Enders about looming bankruptcy. Commenting on the problem of having costs in Euros and income in Dollars he said "It's gone beyond the pain barrier," and is now "life threatening." The greenback's slide has sent the company's margins through the tarmac and there's no sign of an immediate upturn.

Sales at Airbus haven't been great lately. The A380 Superjumbo was meant to take the fight to Boeing, but orders have been sluggish. They're currently losing $25m per aircraft. The staff think that the anguished talk is all an exercise to soften them up for redundancies, but there's no doubting that things ain't great for Airbus right now.

No comments: