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The chief executive of Airbus told employees that the company is “bleeding cash” and warned that its survival was at stake unless it took immediate action.
Guillaume Faury warned in a letter to workers, first reported by Bloomberg, that a recent plan to cut production rates by one-third didn’t reflect the worst-case scenario, and would be kept under review.
“We’re bleeding cash at an unprecedented speed, which may threaten the very existence of our company,” Faury wrote in the letter to staff sent late on Friday. “We must now act urgently to reduce our cash-out, restore our financial balance and, ultimately, to regain control of our destiny,” he added.
Shares in Airbus AIR, -2.42% were trading 2.25% lower in early morning trading on Monday.
The letter is the third Airbus has AIR, -2.42% sent to employees since the start of the pandemic, according to a person close to the situation, as the world’s biggest commercial aircraft manufacturer seeks to keep employees informed of the crisis that has brought international air travel to a virtual standstill, causing airlines world-wide to defer or cancel orders for aircraft.
Earlier in April, British low-cost carrier easyJet EZJ, +2.79% said it would defer delivery of at least 24 Airbus aircraft, which it was due to receive over the next three years.
Airbus, the world’s biggest commercial aircraft manufacturer AIR, -2.42% is due to report first-quarter results on Wednesday.
Faury also told the company’s 135,000 employees to brace for potentially deeper job cuts.
Last week, Airbus said it was starting to implement government-assisted furlough schemes, beginning with 3,000 workers in France, “but we may now need to plan for more far-reaching measures,” Faury said in the letter that was also seen by Reuters.
A spokesman for Airbus said the company wouldn’t “comment on internal communications.”
The plane maker said on April 3 that it will slash aircraft production of its popular A320 single-aisle jet by a third from 60 to 40 as it tries to protect the company’s balance sheet. It will also cut production of its A330 planes to two and A350s to six.
“In just a couple of weeks we have lost roughly one-third of our business. And, frankly, that’s not even the worst case scenario we could face,” Faury said. He added that Airbus has already secured credit lines to allow the company “time to adapt and resize.”
“Unfortunately, the aviation industry will emerge into this new world very much weaker and more vulnerable than we went into it,” Faury wrote.
Airbus rival Boeing BA, -0.69% is also struggling after it had to stop production of its 737 Max and, on Saturday, the U.S. plane maker abandoned a $4.2 billion merger with Brazil’s Embraer ERJ, -11.68% commercial aircraft business.
Boeing said it ended the agreement after Embraer didn’t meet conditions laid out by the deal, in which Boeing would have held majority ownership.
However, Embraer issued a statement saying it “believes strongly that Boeing has wrongfully terminated” the mutual transaction agreement [MTA] and “that it has manufactured false claims as a pretext to seek to avoid its commitments to close the transaction and pay Embraer the US$4.2 billion purchase price.”
“Over the past several months, we had productive but ultimately unsuccessful negotiations,” Boeing senior vice president Marc Allen said in a statement, adding, “It is deeply disappointing. But we have reached a point where continued negotiation within the framework of the MTA isn’t going to resolve the outstanding issues.”
