Due to the corona crisis, the European aircraft manufacturer Airbus wants to cut around 15,000 jobs worldwide, including more than 5,000 in Germany alone. By summer 2021, 11 percent of the workforce worldwide will be cut, Airbus said on Tuesday evening.
According to the company, the group is responding to the slump in demand for passenger aircraft. Germany is most affected with 5100 job cuts. Another 5,000 jobs are to be cut in France, 1,700 in the UK and 900 in Spain. The group also did not rule out redundancies.
Airbus had lost almost half a billion euros in the first quarter due to the pandemic. The minus in the first three months of the year amounted to 481 million euros. In the same quarter of the previous year, the bottom line was a profit of 40 million euros.
It is expected that air traffic will not recover before 2023 and may not be at the level before the Corona crisis until 2025, the company said. The details of the job cuts would now be discussed with the social partners.
“Worst crisis the industry has ever experienced”
Airbus is “facing the worst crisis this industry has ever experienced,” said CEO Guillaume Faury. He had previously announced that Airbus would cut production and deliveries by 40 percent for two years.
The French government announced in early June that it would support the aviation industry with a total of 15 billion euros. Airbus should also benefit from this.
Criticism from the French government
The French Ministry of Economy criticized the planned extent of the job cuts. The ministry said the aviation industry was “massive, brutal, and persistent,” and it was very likely that it would recover only gradually. “However, the job cuts announced by Airbus are exaggerated.”
He “does not expect much support in this situation, even if we work closely with the governments concerned,” Faury responded to the criticism from the ministry in a conference call with journalists.
Global air traffic has plummeted due to the corona pandemic. The airlines are buying fewer new machines. Airbus’ major rival, the US aircraft manufacturer Boeing, also announced in April that it plans to cut ten percent of its positions in the passenger aircraft division.
