The threat of job cuts has raised the prospect of governments buying into EADS to shore their bargaining position when the Airbus axe falls.
When it was set up in 2000, EADS's shareholdings reflected the size of its founding organisations, with Germany's DaimlerChrysler taking a 30% stake and France's Lagardère and the government 15% each. Spain had 5.5%. Since then, DaimlerChrysler and Lagardère have both reduced their stakes by 7.5 percentage points, with the pool of free-floating shares growing to 42%.
Now the Berlin government is reported to be interested in buying some of DaimlerChrysler's stake. Although German industry is almost entirely privately-owned, the government is keen to have the same status as France, whose ministers, by virtue of the state's 15% share, have always enjoyed a direct line to EADS's French senior management.
Christian Wulff, prime minister of Lower Saxony, one of Germany's 16 states, has also spoken publicly about the possibility that the states could each buy into EADS.
Spain too has long harboured ambitions to increase its 5.5% share, which gives its state-run holding company SEPI just one seat out of 10 on the EADS board.
And the availability of EADS shares on the stock market has even prompted a state-controlled Russian bank, Vneshtorgbank, to snatch a 5.6% stake, with Moscow keen to influence investment decisions by EADS in the restructured Russian aerospace industry.
Source: Flight International