Airbus: Oh no, everyone wants to buy planes – economy

Guillaume Faury allowed a brief look behind the scenes for a moment. When asked about the difficulties Airbus is having with supply chains at the moment, he shook his head. The situation is “enormously frustrating, enormously frustrating.”

After the demand collapsed during the Corona pandemic, it came back with a bang. Airbus can hardly save itself from demand, just this week Air India ordered 250 aircraft. At the same time, however, the suppliers are destroying the aircraft group’s expansion plans: “We need two years for what we planned for a year,” complained Faury at the company’s balance sheet press conference in Toulouse.

Airbus is sticking to the goal of building 75 short- and medium-haul A320neo series machines per month, but this will no longer be possible in 2025, but around a year later. Airbus currently only produces around 45 machines of the type per month and the group wants to increase the number to 65 by the end of 2024. Airbus had already been able to deliver significantly fewer aircraft with 661 machines in 2022 – originally well over 700 were planned.

Airbus hopes to deliver around 720 aircraft

There are some problems with the suppliers: engines are delivered too late, spare parts are missing, even if sometimes they are just chips for in-flight entertainment. Airlines complain about delivery delays of up to half a year, even though Faury believed in autumn 2022 that things couldn’t get any worse. In the current year, Airbus hopes to be able to deliver around 720 aircraft – about as many as was planned a year earlier.

But there is also good news: in 2022, despite everything, Airbus increased its operating profit from 4.9 to 5.6 billion euros, and sales increased from 52 to 58.8 billion euros. The civil aircraft division was practically exclusively responsible for the better figures with a profit of 4.6 billion euros (2021: 3.6 billion euros), while defense and space saw a slump of 45 percent.

The second good news is that demand for the lucrative long-haul aircraft, which had collapsed almost completely during Corona, is also picking up. That is why the group now wants to increase production of the A350 from six machines per month to nine by the end of 2025, and the smaller A330neo is to go from three to four per month in 2024.

With growth returning, it is all the more important for Airbus that the Science Based Targets (SBTi) initiative has approved the company’s environmental targets. Airbus has committed to reducing the CO₂ emissions generated in production and administration (Scope 1 and 2) by 63 percent by 2030. The so-called Scope 3 emissions caused by the operation of Airbus aircraft are to be reduced by 46 percent per seat-kilometer by 2035.

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