Airbus is in trouble. It has been forced to rescheduled deliveries of its superduper A380. Twice. This takes a good deal of sheen off the parent company EADS' reputation, about €5.5B in net worth sheen. To contain the damage, the company is performing a managerial finger-pointing review.
The recent reschedule was announced with an abruptness that appears to have caught upper management and investors completely by surprise. How could this happen? Were there no signs of trouble? Well, yes there were and any executive oversight that slopped around in the entrails of Airbus might easily have read the auguries.
The first sign was, well, the first announced reschedule last June. Not a catastrophe, but with the future of Airbus riding on the A380, management should have had a very strong hand in the follow-on, a smothering presence. But the same problems that led to the first reschedule also led to the second reschedule: poor project management, poor intramural communications, and late parts delivery. Above all you cannot build an airplane without the parts of the airplane.
TOULOUSE, France June 15, 2006 (AFP) - Convoys of trucks bringing these parts [scil., wings and fuselage] from the airport at Bordeaux in southwest France to Toulouse, where Airbus is based, were running at the rate of two per month at the beginning of the year, but there has been almost no traffic for two months. A source close to authorities responsible for road traffic said on Monday that the last three convoys due to have travelled since April had been postponed, and inside the company a source who declined to be named said that "the convoys will not roll again until September".Last week Airbus had said merely that a few deliveries had been delayed recently.
To put some hurry-up on assembly, the main production plant in Toulouse brought in loan workers from factories in Germany, Britain, and Spain.
AIRBUS REPORTS POSSIBLE SABOTAGE IN FACTORY
TOULOUSE June 10, 2006 (AFP) - The aircraft manufacturer Airbus said Saturday that three cables were found cut on an Airbus A380 that was being assembled at its Toulouse factory in southwestern France. An internal investigation is underway to determine what happened and why, said an Airbus spokeswoman, adding that any indication of sabotage has not been established.
This was probably caused by carelessness as loan workers are reported to have "walked on" the cables. This sounds suspiciously like a story floated to test its broader excuse value in the run-up to the announced delays. Anyway no more sabotage stories.
Another sign that trouble's ahead, is when a huddle of top management exercise share options reducing their position in the company. All at or about the same time. And one big felicitious coincidence when these sales beat out a disastrous earnings report.
CO-CHIEF OF EADS DEFENDS SHARE SALE
PARIS June 16, 2006 (IHT) - The embattled co-chief executive of European Aeronautic Defense & Space on Friday defended the timing of his sell-off of EADS stock as "coincidence," as the French and German market regulators announced investigations into the crash of the company's shares.
In a radio interview, Noël Forgeard also confirmed that the group's Airbus unit first informed senior EADS management about possible delays to the A380 delivery schedule in April [NB] - almost two months before the problem was disclosed to shareholders, but a month after he and his children unloaded shares worth millions of euros.
Children usually come by stock from a conscientious parent who wants to secure their future and therefore is keen to protect asset value.
Forgeard and others disposed of their stock shortly before news that DaimlerChrysler and Lagardère were selling part of their stakes in the company, which also sent the share price down, although nothing like the 26 percent drop on Wednesday after news of the A380's delay.Documents filed with the French market regulator, the AMF, show that Forgeard exercised options for €3 million, or $3.8 million, worth of EADS shares on March 9 and sold €2.5 million worth on March 15. Forgeard's children sold €4.2 million worth of shares on March 17. François Auque and Jean- Paul Gut, EADS board members, also sold shares around the same period.
Forgeard insisted he had no "privileged information" before the sales, describing the timing as an "unfortunate coincidence."
"Between March 9 and March 17, we did not know there was a problem. What we knew was that there was a race against the clock for the A380. … It's a very complicated plane, given the scale of the project, there was a bottleneck, and unfortunately the alarm bells didn't go off at the right time," said Forgeard, who ran Airbus from 1998 until 2005.
Now it is true that share trading by company executives is rigidly governed by both a calendar and rules. Such trades are reviewed and approved by a compliance officer. However, the critical condition of the trade is that the executive attests he has no privileged or inside information prompting the trade.*
Now here's the rub.
M. Forgeard headed Airbus from 1998 to 2005, that is from the inception of the A380 project (greenlighted in 1999). For a world-class executive as intimately associated with a project as M. Forgeard was with the A380, it is hard to imagine him not aware of ongoing production problems from the year before and new problems in the electrical assembly. These are not problems that sprang up overnight. Nor are they problems that are easily hidden in incident reports or buried in weekly-monthly-quarterly production reports. The re-estimated 2007 deliveries fell from 25 aircraft to 9. That is a stunning 64% falloff.
Yet M. Forgeard would ask us to believe difficulties in production did not become insuperable -- or insuperable and apparent -- till this April past. How, we wonder, could 25 deliveries look possible in mid-March and suddenly impossible in April? M. Forgeard is either criminally incompetent (which no one appears to be argue) or we are hard pressed not to think him lying.
EADS BOSS WAITS TO HEAR HIS FATE
June 27, 2006 (BBC) - Reports claim shareholders will call for Noel Forgeard to quit his post in proposals they are to put forward to the French government.
* To avoid a conflict of interest, many executives sign over their company holdings and options to a blind trust that manages these independent of instructions from the owner. The owner remains in the dark about the management and status of the assets until the trust is revoked.
PFFT (What is this?): Some story 3½ | Rayonnement français 0
Why you Hate France ???
French Man are Fuck you GirlFriend...LoL...
What is you reaction When You Country is the DOG are USA (Ouarf Ouarf Couché au pied...) ??????
I Have Many Document of You Country or the USA are CORRUPTE by Blair (Olympique Game 2012 TRICH...)
or Bush (No Arm , No War OK , Who SALE GUN at HITHLER in 30'S ????? It's Prescoth BUSH , BUSH..that name is Familiar for me not for you ;) It's the GRANDFATHER at G.W.BUSH
M. DaviD,
We do not hate the French in the manner you suggest. But were we to envelope France with a one-size-fits-all hatred, it would in no small part be due to French donkeys like you.
The Management
Bonjour,
Oui David pendant que Prescott Bush se remplissait les poches avec les Nazis ou que Henry Ford (l'homme des bagnoles, (dire qu' il n' y a pas d'avocats assez teigneux en France ,pour demander des réparations à Ford)) continuait , comme depuis les années 20 , à financer des criminels et des agitateurs Nazis , 100 000 Français se faisaient trouer la peau comme mon grand-père...
Et ils nous donnent des leçons de morale !!!
Bonjour,
Se souvenir de ceci:
D'après " Business Week" la carlingue ""révolutionnaire"" du "Dreamliner" présente de graves fissures lors d'essais.
Le management de PF aime à effacer rapidement ce type de message...
Curieux non ?
"Dreamliner" un cauchemar ?
Bonjour,
Le lien qui tente de dissimuler le désastre:
[[http://challengestempsreel.nouvelobs.com/business/art_47571.html]]
