Even better than in 2021. Airbus announced this Thursday a net profit of 4.2 billion euros for 2022, constituting a new record. It climbed 1% in one year, despite the problems encountered by the European aircraft manufacturer to increase its production as it had planned due to supply difficulties with its suppliers. The manufacturer has indeed delivered “only” 661 appliances last year instead of the 720 originally planned, and now intends to deliver 720 to its customers in 2023.
“We achieved solid financial results in an unfavorable operating environment that prevented our supply chain from recovering at the expected rate”, summarizes its executive chairman. Guillaume Faury in a press release. It recognizes that with the objective of 720 devices to be delivered in 2023, it is a question of “adapting” to the capacities of its suppliers to follow it.
A350 ramp-up
The global chain of suppliers – Airbus has more than 10,000 – weakened by the pandemic, found itself in difficulty to follow the ramp-up decreed by the aircraft manufacturer, juggling between recruitment difficulties, tensions on the supply in certain materials raw materials, global logistics disruptions and the energy crisis caused by the invasion of Ukraine.
For its best-selling A320 family, however, the aircraft manufacturer maintains an ambitious goal, although postponed by a few months, to deliver 65 single-aisle aircraft per month “by the end of 2024” and 75 aircraft per month in 2026.
The resumption of global air traffic, including on long-haul routes, also leads it to “conduct a feasibility study with suppliers to target monthly production of 9 A350s by the end of 2025”, a third more than at the current time.