AndrzejJeziorski/MUNICH
Daimler-Benz Aerospace (Dasa) has underlined the turnaround in Germany's long-suffering aerospace industry, revealing record sales for 1997 and promising profits across the group.
Full profit figures will be revealed on 8 April, but Dasa chairman Manfred Bischoff claims that the results will exceed expectations, with every business unit back in the black. He adds that the group began rehiring staff in 1997 after the swingeing cutbacks started in 1992. Bischoff notes that, since then, the group has increased efficiency and lowered costs by 30%.
Solid growth across most of the group was led by a 40% boom in sales and orders at Dasa Airbus. Production capacity at the Hamburg A319/A321 assembly plant is due to continue to grow this year, rising from six aircraft a month to 11 by the start of 1999.
Bischoff admits that 1998 will not reproduce 1997's "absolute fireworks display". Airliner orders are expected to drop off following Asia's economic downturn. He notes that intense competition has pushed prices down by 20% over the past couple of years, offsetting some of the rise in output.
The MTU propulsion unit also carried on its recovery with sales rising by 30% to a new record. The unit will now focus on expanding its servicing business and its role in the Eurofighter's EJ200 engine.
Although military-aircraft sales increased by 6%, Germany's military-budget cuts continued to slow growth at Dasa's defence-systems arm. The deal to bring the LFK missiles unit within the Matra BAe Dynamics venture is close to completion, says Bischoff, adding that talks are also going on with Germany's privately owned Diehl group over a further possible missiles merger with its BGT subsidiary. Progress has been slow, however, and Bischoff suggests that Diehl is not keen to sell.
Talks are also under way with British Aerospace and Rheinmetall about merging elements of Dasa's defence-systems unit with some parts of their STN Atlas subsidiary.
The Dasa performance has heralded an upturn across the German industry. The German Aerospace Industries Association (BDLI) estimates that sales climbed by around 20%in 1997, breaking through the DM20 billion ($11 billion) mark for the first time since the downturn. "We are experiencing an upturn which was unthinkable a short while ago," says BDLI chief Hans Eberhard Birke.
German sales were virtually halved during the recession, diving from nearly DM27 billion at the height of the boom in 1991 to just over DM15 billion at the depth of the recession in 1995. The recovery began in 1996 with 11% growth and the BDLI estimates that it again broke through the DM20 billion barrier in 1997.
More growth is predicted for 1998, depending on fluctuations in the dollar exchange rate. The weakness of the dollar was largely blamed for the earlier crisis, which reached its nadir in 1995 as the deutschemark attained a high of around DM1.4 to the dollar. It has since fallen by 25%,to around DM1.8.
Employment in the industry has also stabilised at about 60,000 people, with the influx of new orders, says Birke.
Source: Flight International
