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| Lufthansa Technik is one of the biggest aerospace employers in the Hamburg region |
Germany’s aerospace industry is concentrated in – but by no means exclusive to – two regions: Bavaria in the south east and Hamburg in the north west. Both areas have prominent “champions”: Airbus and Lufthansa Technik in the case of Hamburg; EADS and MTU for Bavaria. But the two regions are also keen to encourage overseas investment and develop the capabilities of their small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) sector.
According to BDLI, Hamburg is in terms of businesses and employees the world’s third-largest aerospace “cluster”, behind Seattle and Toulouse. Some 30,000 work in aerospace in the region, with the Airbus A380 alone responsible for 4,000 new jobs over the past five years. The Hamburg Business Development Corporation says it believes another 4,000 jobs can be created in the next four years helped by a €23.5 million ($29.6 million) funding by the state government of more than 30 research and development projects aimed at “strengthening the performance and competitiveness of medium-sized companies”.
At the other end of the country, Bavaria is home to the headquarters of EADS’s defence and security systems business as well as the German half of its Eurocopter business. MTU in Munich is another prominent employer, but SMEs make up much of the sector. They include Grob Aerospace, manufacturer of the new SPn busines and utility jet, as well as specialist equipment and systems suppliers.
The collapse of regional aircraft builder Fairchild Dornier in 2002 (and a subsequent ill-fated bid to revive its small jet business) with the loss of almost 4,000 jobs dealt a bodyblow to the region at a time when employment in Hamburg was rising thanks to Airbus. But Martin Haunschild, responsible for co-ordinating the aerospace cluster in Bavaria, says the region has recovered and the problem is today “having too few engineers rather than too many”.
The state government last year allocated €50 million to create 20 “platforms” – small groups of companies with overlapping specialisms and designed to “promote the sharing of complementary technologies”. It is part of around €200 million Bavaria has invested in research and development and training in the industry over the past 15 years. “In Bavaria, innovation is driven by aerospace,” says Haunschild.
Source: Flight International
