Aircraft maker Airbus sets its sights on ‘recovery and growth’ after posting record profits

Airbus has set its sights on ‘recovery and growth’ as the aviation industry bounces back from the pandemic. 

The aircraft maker, which is based in France and has 12,500 staff in the UK at sites in Filton near Bristol and Broughton in Flintshire, posted record profits of £3.5bn for 2021 having made a loss of £918m the previous year. 

And in a boost to shareholders, it proposed its first dividend for two years of €1.50 a share, totalling £984m. 

Chief executive Guillaume Faury said: ‘2021 was a year of transition, where our attention shifted from navigating the pandemic towards recovery and growth.’ 

In contrast, Faury warned after Covid struck in early 2020 that the company was ‘in the midst of the gravest crisis the industry has ever known’ and ‘bleeding cash at an unprecedented speed.’ 

At the time, Airbus announced plans to axe 15,000 of its 135,000 workforce worldwide including 1,700 in the UK, where it designs and makes aeroplane wings. Airbus also furloughed 3,200 workers at the North Wales plant not long after the first UK lockdown in March 2020, after announcing that it planned to cut aircraft production by a third. 

The scale of the job cuts was reduced, however, and the outlook for 2022 was upbeat, with Airbus expecting to deliver 720 commercial planes to customers this year compared to the 611 delivered in 2021. The global aviation industry is attempting to recover from the pandemic when many planes were grounded and their airline owners haemorrhaged cash.