TOULOUSE (dpa-AFX) – The world’s largest aircraft manufacturer Airbus (Airbus SE) wants to deliver 820 jets as planned this year despite a shortage of engines. CEO Guillaume Faury is sticking to this goal, even though the European DAX group (DAX) would have to hand over more than 300 machines to its customers in the last three months. The troubled competitor Boeing from the USA had to postpone the delivery of its largest jet, the 777X, for another year. While Airbus continues to increase its profits, Boeing is losing billions more.
The news from Wednesday was received in opposite directions on the financial market: Boeing shares were recently the biggest loser on Wall Street in the leading index, the Dow Jones, with a price loss of 4.6 percent. The Airbus share, however, recently rose by two percent to 212.70 euros in after-hours trading on the Tradegate platform compared to the Xetra closing price. If the price rises to this level on Thursday, Airbus shares would be more expensive than ever.
Airbus and Boeing sit on thick order books and can hardly keep up with the delivery of new and more economical aircraft. While Boeing has to get its own problems under control after quality defects, incidents and two crashes, Airbus has been struggling primarily with bottlenecks among its suppliers since the end of the corona pandemic.
Last year, Airbus only delivered 766 aircraft. Even if there will be 820 jets in 2025 as planned, the record level of 863 aircraft from 2019 is still a long way away. Faury did not want to promise when Airbus would break this mark again. It is still too early to make a forecast for 2026, he said in a telephone conference with journalists that evening.
However, the manager wants to further ramp up production of several model series in the coming year. For the smallest model, the A220, there will initially only be 12 machines per month, two fewer than previously planned. This is due as much to suppliers as to customers who want to wait for a new version of the engines, he explained.
In the current year, the increased delivery figures are expected to increase the special item adjusted operating profit (adjusted EBIT) to around seven billion euros, as planned. The board has now taken into account the consequences of the customs dispute with the USA.
The free cash inflow before customer financing should continue to reach around 4.5 billion euros. Although it was positive in the third quarter, it was still in the red after the first nine months at 914 million euros. However, by then Airbus had only delivered 507 commercial aircraft. According to CFO Thomas Toepfer, the remaining 313 machines should provide the necessary boost to the cash flow in the fourth quarter.
Airbus’ business boomed in the third quarter, especially as the RTX subsidiary (Raytheon Technologies) Pratt & Whitney and the CFM alliance of SAFRAN and GE Aerospace (GE Aerospace (ex General Electric)) once again delivered more engines for the highly sought-after medium-haul jets of the A320neo model family. By the end of September, the number of new machines without engines in front of the factory halls had continued to decline, said Faury. The number should be zero by the end of December.
Meanwhile, Airbus achieved sales of 17.8 billion euros in the months July to September, 14 percent more than a year earlier. The adjusted operating profit even jumped by 38 percent to a good 1.9 billion euros. With both values, the group significantly exceeded analysts’ expectations. The surplus, however, only grew by 14 percent to a good 1.1 billion euros, also because changing exchange rates had a negative impact.
At the US company Boeing, however, the year-long crisis was extended by another chapter on Wednesday. With the further postponement of one year, the wide-body 777X jet is now not scheduled to go into scheduled service until 2027 – seven years later than originally planned. First customer Lufthansa is planning without the plane for the time being anyway.
The latest delay is costing Boeing $4.9 billion (4.2 billion euros). Since the first postponement, the extra costs have totaled almost $16 billion. The aircraft is the modernized version of Boeing’s long-time bestseller 777 and the largest twin-engine passenger jet in the world. The competing model is the Airbus A350, especially in its long version A350-1000.
Boeing was once again deeply in the red due to the burden in the third quarter. At $5.3 billion, the loss was lower than a year earlier, but much higher than analysts expected on average. On the other hand, Boeing was surprisingly able to stop the outflow of cash.
Boeing was already in a serious crisis in 2019 after the crash of two medium-haul jets with a total of 346 deaths. The 737 Max model was then no longer allowed to take off anywhere in the world for more than 20 months. After technical improvements, the flight bans were lifted, but further quality defects caused problems for Boeing.
In early 2024, a 737 Max lost a door-sized fuselage section in flight, and authorities placed Boeing under strict supervision. The restrictions set the company back again. Last year it delivered just 348 passenger and cargo jets – not even half as many as Airbus./stw/jsl/zb
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