Airbus is quickly recovering from the corona crisis in aviation

The European aircraft manufacturer Airbus is quickly recovering from the corona crisis in aviation. The Franco-German group expects twice as much profit for the current year with four billion euros as before. After six months, before interest, taxes and special items (adjusted EBIT), there are already 2.7 billion euros to book, as Airbus announced in Toulouse. A year ago, under the impression of the corona pandemic and almost idle air traffic, the group had lost almost a billion euros. Sales soared in the first half of the year by 30 percent to 24.6 billion euros, in the second quarter it even went up by 70 percent. The quarterly figures clearly exceeded the analysts' expectations. The bottom line is a net profit of 2.23 billion euros after six months. In the same period of the previous year, a minus of 1.92 billion euros had accumulated. In the first half of the year, the austerity measures also paid off, said Faury. Airbus is in the process of cutting around 15,000 jobs, most of them in Germany and France. Now Airbus wants to break the dominance of the US arch-rival Boeing in the freight business. The board of directors has given the green light for the development of a cargo version of the Airbus A350, said CEO Guillaume Faury. "We are responding to customer requests for more competition and efficiency in this market segment." Boeing boss Dave Calhoun had spoken the day before about a cargo version of the long-haul jet 777X, which will be available "hopefully in the near future". Airbus also raised expectations for deliveries. 600 commercial aircraft are to be handed over to customers by the end of the year; so far, the previous year's level of 566 machines was the target. In the first half of the year, 297 aircraft were delivered, a good half more than between January and June 2020. However, the airlines and leasing companies shaken by the crisis are still hesitant to place new orders: From January to June there were 165 (previous year: 365) orders, 127 aircraft on order were canceled at the same time. The order backlog, however, is still almost 7,000 machines.