With its A-380 super-jumbo airliner far behind schedule, Airbus is now a year further on without any tangible results from its restructuring plan. An attempt to sell three of its factories in Germany to a German consortium recently failed.

Airbus, whose parent company European Aeronautic Defence & Space is under joint French and German management, had hoped to sell the sites in Augsburg, Nordenham and Varel but to continue to source aircraft parts from them, a way of removing huge start-up costs from the balance sheet. The Airbus plan had been forecast to achieve savings of almost £4 billion, at a loss of 10,000 of its 57,000 work force.

However last month the consortium, OHB Technology, which makes parts for the Ariane space rocket, said that the deal no longer made financial sense. Part of Airbus’s problem is that a weak dollar has sharply increased the price of its products in its principal market, the US, and orders for the A-380 and the mid-range A350, also behind schedule, have been disappointing.

The inability of the German government to persuade France to sweeten the deal by guaranteeing more work for the German factories, including those producing components for the French giant military transport aircraft sold to the UK, is seen by some political commentators as a sign that the traditional France-Germany axis, the dominant partnership in the European Union, is weakening. President Sarkozy’s enthusiastic praise of Britain on his recent visit was designed in part to send a message to Berlin that they could no longer expect preferential treatment.   

From our April 2008 e-newsletter