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Will Boeing Give a Damn?


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1 hour ago, boestar said:

How are we hoodwinked exactly.  We keep Canadian Jobs.  An Excellent aircraft gets a boost. Customers will get better after sales service and support than they would have.  Seems like this may have been a great decision for Canadian Aerospace.

Hoodwinked because BBD sold 50.01% for nada...zilch.  Gave it away.  Airbus will own the rest by 2023. BBD has divested the entire program.  

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The Cost of the "sale" becomes risk.  They have assumed 50% of the risk.  they are also providing service and support, and area which Bombarider has always bee seriously lacking and where Airbus does a good job.

If the program takes off, so to speak. then is was a good deal for Airbus.  if, however, the plane becomes a dud then Airbus will lose right along with Bombardier and the Quebec government.

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What this proves is that a CDN aircraft manufacturer cannot compete in the large commercial aircraft marketplace without unsustainable state subsidies or by selling at below cost. The Airbus partnership made sense 2 years ago and makes even more sense now with the US marketplace effectively closed under status quo ownership and production.

Perhaps BBD will eventually sell its remaining stake. I suspect that for enough $$ the Beaudoin family would say yes. Not sure what the QUE government would do with its stake but the taxpayer should not be in the business of owning publicly traded production companies over the long term.

If Boeing was half as bright as it thought it was by jumping on the nationalist bandwagon and then buying advertising spots in Canada, it would have known that Airbus was nearby and could have made a better offer. But instead they got greedy and stupid.

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2 hours ago, rudder said:

If Boeing was half as bright as it thought it was by jumping on the nationalist bandwagon and then buying advertising spots in Canada, it would have known that Airbus was nearby and could have made a better offer. But instead they got greedy and stupid.

Call me cynical but I believe Boeing somehow got wind of the potential Airbus deal. Then and only then they decided on the "we love Canada" ad buy. It's the corporate version of nominating Palin as a running mate. Completely irrelevant and foolish. 

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3 hours ago, rudder said:

What this proves is that a CDN aircraft manufacturer cannot compete in the large commercial aircraft marketplace without unsustainable state subsidies or by selling at below cost. The Airbus partnership made sense 2 years ago and makes even more sense now with the US marketplace effectively closed under status quo ownership and production.

Perhaps BBD will eventually sell its remaining stake. I suspect that for enough $$ the Beaudoin family would say yes. Not sure what the QUE government would do with its stake but the taxpayer should not be in the business of owning publicly traded production companies over the long term.

If Boeing was half as bright as it thought it was by jumping on the nationalist bandwagon and then buying advertising spots in Canada, it would have known that Airbus was nearby and could have made a better offer. But instead they got greedy and stupid.

Airbus has options to acquire the remaining shares of both parties by 2023 to own the CSeries project outright. Other Bombardier assets, not so.

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3 hours ago, boestar said:

The Cost of the "sale" becomes risk.  They have assumed 50% of the risk.  they are also providing service and support, and area which Bombarider has always bee seriously lacking and where Airbus does a good job.

If the program takes off, so to speak. then is was a good deal for Airbus.  if, however, the plane becomes a dud then Airbus will lose right along with Bombardier and the Quebec government.

There are some interesting opportunities for cross-fertilization of strengths. Bombardier has some state of the art wing assembly technology in Belfast of interest to Airbus that it can adopt in its larger programs, and Airbus has a burgeoning data analytics program that gains immensely from the addition of a non-Airbus-created technology. Also, Airbus has supply chain leverage that Bombardier lacks which will help lower the program costs of the CSeries, or at least slow the rise in costs in real dollar terms. Airbus might wish to look at Bombardier's on-board technology, which is state of the art. And while I don't expect the JV to build a CS500 unless there is a sustainable rise in fuel prices, you never know for sure, since both Airbus and Boeing are booked well into the future for narrow bodies, and perhaps a CS500 would be a low-risk way to build up into the 160-seat range for CSeries operators that would prefer commonality with smaller derivatives.

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Airbus takes Bombardier to the cleaners with C Series deal

Mon Oct 17, 2017 - The Globe and Mail
Eric Reguly - European Bureau Chief

LONDON - You've got to hand it to the brilliant, Machiavellian minds at Airbus.

In one fell swoop, like an eagle swooping down on a dove, Airbus Group SE has seized the world's most technologically advanced small passenger jet, the Bombardier C Series, for nothing – as in zero, zilch, nada – even though Bombardier Inc., with a little help from its government friends, had sunk about $6-billion (U.S.) into developing the product. In doing so, Airbus has neutered a potentially strong competitor and dealt a blow to arch-rival Boeing Co., which has no plane that can compete with the C Series.

It gets better. Bombardier, not Airbus, is still on the hook for as much as $700-million in funding for the C Series over the next three years. Airbus doesn't even have to assume any of Bombardier's debt, which has climbed in recent years to almost $9-billion (Canadian), nearly double its market value. For Airbus, the deal is money for nothing, C Series for free.

And by the way, Airbus, which is 11 per cent owned by the French government and touted as a European corporate champion, had the sweet joy of exposing U.S. President Donald Trump as a true chump. When the U.S. administration slapped preliminary import tariffs of 300 per cent on the C Series a couple of weeks ago, the plane was effectively shut out of the world's biggest commercial jet market. Facing catastrophic losses on the slow-selling C Series, poor, hapless Bombardier had no negotiating power. Airbus could write the deal it wanted.

And yet you could argue that Bombardier made the best of an impossible situation and that the Airbus deal actually presents good prospects for Bombardier, for Quebec and for Canada.

The C Series is to be owned 50.01 per cent by Airbus, 31 per cent by Bombardier and 19 per cent by the Quebec government, which in 2016 sunk $1-billion (U.S.) into the project after it was overwhelmed by delays and cost overruns.

The optimistic case says it's better for Bombardier and Quebec to own almost half of a plane that stands a good chance of selling, now that Airbus's formidable global marketing, financing and servicing power is behind it, than 100 per cent of a plane that that was stuck in the hangar. In theory, the C Series could sell a few thousand jets over its life span – the order tally so far is only 350 – allowing Bombardier and Quebec to recoup their investment, perhaps even earn a return on that investment.

The pessimistic case says that Bombardier and the taxpayers of Canada and Quebec, who have propped up Bombardier in general and the C Series in particular for years, got taken to the cleaners. This case is more compelling.

Remember, the C Series is to become an Airbus product owned by a European company with zero allegiance to Bombardier or Canada, even though it will be happy to take Bombardier's $700-milllion to cover the C Series' losses for the next two years. Might the Canadian or Quebec taxpayer be forced to cover some of these losses? That scenario cannot be ruled out, all in the name of protecting manufacturing jobs in Quebec.

Which leads us to Alabama, of all places. Airbus recently opened a plant in the state to assemble the company's workhorse A320 jet for the North American market. Airbus intends to add a C Series assembly line in Alabama to serve the plane's U.S. customers and circumvent the Commerce Department's murderous tariffs. (Though Boeing, which called for the tariffs, is bound to use every one of its conniving ways to ensure any non-U.S. parts do not enter the country duty-free.)

There is a reason that Airbus chose Alabama for its assembly plant; it's a cheap place to do business, where "right to work" laws discourage unions. You can bet that if Airbus finds it less expensive to pump out the C Series in Alabama than Quebec, it will do everything in its power to transfer production to Alabama, unless, of course, Quebec fights back. And how would it do that? By offering to subsidize production north of the border to keep Bombardier's Quebec jobs from vanishing into the night. Bombardier is Quebec's, and Canada's, premier engineering and technology company. Quebec won't let those jobs go easily.

Two years ago, Bombardier and Airbus spent months negotiating a deal that reportedly would have seen Airbus finance the remaining development costs of the C Series in exchange for a controlling stake in the project. Note the date: It was a year before anyone could imagine that Donald Trump and his "America First" agenda could take over the White House. (The deal went nowhere.)

At the time, Bombardier had some negotiating power. But as soon as the C Series got slammed with the tariffs, it was game over and Airbus was able to negotiate a sweet deal that will see Bombardier – and perhaps the Canadian and Quebec taxpayers – still write the cheques for a product over which it has lost control.

Airbus was brilliant. It owns the finest piece of Canadian aerospace technology on the market, and it got Bombardier to subsidize the deal.

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Bombardier jet giveaway hands Donald Trump another victory

Airbus deal virtually guarantees that the U.S will get the lion's share of any new C Series jobs created.

Tues Oct 17, 2017 - Toronto Star
By Thomas Walkom - National Affairs Columnist

Score another win for Donald Trump’s high-handed version of protectionism. Monday’s decision by Montreal-based Bombardier to give away control over its much-vaunted C Series jet virtually guarantees that the U.S. will get the lion’s share of any new jobs created.

It also threatens to saddle taxpayers in Quebec and the rest of Canada with a good chunk of the $6 billion debt Bombardier incurred developing the jet.

How did Canada’s most important state-subsidized, high-tech company get into this mess? The long answer is complicated and involves corporate incompetence as well as the geopolitics of the global aerospace industry.

The short answer is the election of America First advocate Trump as U.S. president.

The latest chapter of this ongoing saga began in April when American aerospace giant Boeing formally complained to the U.S. Commerce Department about Bombardier’s proposed sale of 125 C Series jets to Delta Air Lines.

Charging that the project had been improperly subsidized by the Canadian and Quebec governments, Boeing asked that an 80 per cent tariff be slapped on any C Series plane entering the U.S.

The Trump administration was more than agreeable. It imposed a preliminary tariff of 300 per cent, thereby making the Canadian-manufactured jet virtually unsalable in the lucrative U.S. market.

That posed a real problem.

Bombardier’s solution was quite simple. It was to move production of planes intended for the U.S. market to a plant in Alabama.

That non-union plant is owned by the European aerospace giant Airbus.

For Airbus, the arrangement is sweet. In return for letting Bombardier use its Alabama plant, it gets just over 50 per cent of the C Series project for free. It doesn’t have to pony up a cent.

Nor does it have to absorb any of Bombardier’s sizable $8.7 billion debt, much of which was incurred developing the C Series.

For Bombardier too, this is a good deal. By moving assembly from Canada to the U.S., it avoids the 300 per cent tariff and keeps the Delta sale alive. As well, it gets to locate its American production in a so-called right-to-work state that promises cheap wages and is vehemently anti-union.

While it no longer controls the C Series, Bombardier does get to keep a 31 per cent stake in the project for at least 7.5 years. And it can take advantage of Airbus’ global reach to market the jet.

I am not sure that this is such a good deal for Quebec. Its 49.5 per cent stake in the project, for which it paid $1.25 billion, has been whittled down to just over 19 per cent.

Ottawa has sunk less into Bombardier. Its latest contribution to the C Series bailout was a $372.5 million loan — which it might get back. Bombardier has repaid roughly one half of the $1.3 billion in federal loans it and its predecessor companies were given between 1996 and 2008.

But the Airbus deal effectively marks another failure in Canada’s long-running efforts to nurture a homegrown aerospace industry. It seems we are not big enough to go it alone.

Economic benefits? The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, which represents Bombardier’s Montreal plant, says it is pleased that the roughly 2,000 people working on the C Series there are to keep their jobs.

But the question of where new jobs might go remains unresolved.

Certainly, Alabama will get any new jobs involved in the manufacture of jets for the U.S. market. State Governor Kay Ivey has already issued a press release welcoming them. But where will the project’s new owner, Airbus, locate production for other markets?

It could choose Bombardier’s unionized plant in Montreal and win the eternal gratitude of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Or it could choose its cheaper, non-union plant in Alabama and score points with protectionist Trump who, whether you like him or not, is still the most powerful man in the world.

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Bombardier's surrender of C Series an act of desperation
 
Wed Oct 18, 2017 - The Globe and Mail
By Konrad Yakabuski
 
The only surprise about Bombardier's move to surrender control of the C Series to one or the other member of the planet's big-airplane duopoly is that it took this long.
 
During this nearly two-decade-long saga, the odds were always stacked against Bombardier. Its decision to try to take on Airbus and Boeing on their own turf – the 100-plus seat jet category – always contained an element of sheer recklessness. Betting the house on a product that sought to eat into the market share of its rich and ruthless rivals was not the kind of provocation Bombardier could ever afford to make on its own. That is now painfully clear as Canada's national aerospace champion hands the C Series controls to Airbus for not even so much as a symbolic $1.
 
Sure, it's fine to celebrate Bombardier's innovative spirit and sheer bloody-mindedness in pursuing the C Series dream. And from an engineering perspective, the C Series is a truly beautiful machine.
 
But its move to cede control of the C Series now for zero cash seems like an act of desperation. Airbus's undertaking to keep the C Series program and the current jobs associated with it based in Quebec is, like most such agreements, unenforceable. If C Series sales fail to take off, or a downturn hits the entire aerospace sector, as it surely will at some point, guess which jobs will go first?
 
That it has come to this is hardly a shocker to industry experts. Many believe Bombardier was never on solid enough ground to make this plane a commercial success. The company first conceded that in 2000. That's when, under CEO Bob Brown, it first abandoned plans to enter the 100-plus-seat market with a plane, then dubbed the BRJ-X, that it had introduced at Britain's Farnborough Air Show in 1998. It took a second go at Airbus and Boeing a few years later by restarting the program – with a new name, the C Series – and hiring former Boeing executive Gary Scott to pilot the design and commercialization. It bet on Airbus and Boeing being too busy focusing on bigger planes to even notice.
 
It was dead wrong. While Boeing and Airbus did opt to simply overhaul their respective families of single-aisle jets with new engines, rather than design entirely new plans like Bombardier, they were not about to cede the lower end of the market to this Canadian upstart. Especially when Bombardier, which had never fully recovered from the post-2001 downturn of the airline industry, looked as vulnerable as it did.
 
Bombardier put the C Series program on hold again in 2006. But Laurent Beaudoin, scion of the Bombardier-Beaudoin family that controls the company, could never give up the dream. Within a year, the C Series was back on the agenda and governments in Canada and Britain stepped up with cash.
 
Only company insiders know how seriously Mr. Beaudoin or his successor as chief executive officer, son Pierre Beaudoin, pursued a partnership with Boeing or Airbus back then. But it's clear now that such a move would have been much smarter than trying to go it alone. By developing a new plane in partnership with either of its bigger rivals, Bombardier may have been able to negotiate from a stronger position. By the time it tried to lure Airbus into a deal in 2015, it was no longer in a position to call the shots.
 
As for Bombardier's vaunted research and development division, the biggest in Corporate Canada, much uncertainty remains. What's left to develop after the C Series? Will Airbus give Bombardier the green light to proceed with the design of an even bigger version of the C Series? Or will it protect the market for its own A320neo, the closest plane to the C Series in the Airbus family of jets?
 
If there is any consolation for Canadians in this deal it is that Boeing appears to have been hoisted with its own petard. After Bombardier's 2015 flirtation with Airbus, Boeing may have undertaken its trade complaint against the C Series in the expectation that some kind of tie up between Bombardier and Boeing's European nemesis was inevitable. Ironically, a partnership between Bombardier and Boeing arguably made more sense, since Boeing's 737 MAX (its closest rival to the C Series) has had limited success compared to the runaway success of A320neo.
 
By launching its trade case, Boeing ended up driving Bombardier into Airbus's arms. And this time, Bombardier was in an even weaker negotiating position than in 2015. With Airbus now in control, not only has Boeing failed to neutralize its Canadian upstart. It risks seeing Airbus control an even bigger share of the 100- to 150-seat plane market.
 
Somebody's dream is coming true. Just not Bombardier's.
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1 hour ago, DEFCON said:

Isn't there a law that prohibits the sale of a majority interest in a Canadian company to foreign interests without Federal approval?  

Quote

'Over the summer, Ottawa entered into secret negotiations with Boeing to end the trade dispute, sources say. Bombardier was interested in striking a deal with Boeing that would have created a strategic partnership at the same time as Boeing would have dropped its complaints, but the company refused. Bombardier also explored a C Series partnership with several Chinese state-owned enterprises, including Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, according to separate sources. But Ottawa was not keen on a deal between the Canadian plane maker and a Chinese partner, and federal officials made their views known to the company and facilitated discussions with Airbus, the sources said.'

"We raised the fact that this had to be approved under the Investment Canada Act, and that a deal with the Chinese would be more complicated than a deal with Airbus," a senior government official said. The key problem, as in any deal with companies in China, is the ownership of intellectual property, the official said. "For economic and political reasons, it wasn't an interesting proposition," another source said. "There was no arm twisting, but it was made clear that Airbus was preferable to China."

'How Airbus landed Bombardier’s C Series'

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13 hours ago, rudder said:

Airbus won the lottery.

BBD and the CDN taxpayer can say that a great aircraft was designed and built in Canada, but with little else to show for it.

Boeing is left holding a burning bag of ......

If you're the government and the noble Quebec aerospace worker is now under the EADS umbrella that is probably tax dollars well spent.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I see our current Government will be sitting on their hands re a fighter jet replacement until the year of the next federal election.

Feds still committed to procuring interim jets, open bids for replacement fleet 'early 2019'

Evan Solomon, Carla Qualtrough

Host of CTV's Question Period Evan Solomon and Public Services and Procurement Minister Carla Qualtrough.

Rachel Aiello, Ottawa News Bureau Online Producer

@rachaiello


Published Saturday, November 11, 2017 7:00AM EST

OTTAWA -- The federal government is still committed to procuring 18 interim fighter jets and start the bidding process on the replacement fleet in "early 2019," says the minister in charge of the file.

Public Services and Procurement Minister Carla Qualtrough confirmed that it’s still her government's intention to move ahead on the fighter jet procurement process, despite it being taken out of her mandate letter when she was appointed to the role in August.

"Right now we’re still looking at ways to, on an interim basis, replenish our fleet until the full fleet replenishment is in place. We’re going to do a fair, open, transparent process for the full fleet replacement," Qualtrough said in an interview with Evan Solomon, host of CTV’s Question Period.

When Qualtrough took on the job -- replacing Judy Foote who resigned for family reasons -- the updated mandate letter made no mention of new jets. In her predecessor’s marching orders, it stated Foote was to: "Work with the Minister of National Defence and the Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development to launch an open and transparent competition to replace the CF-18 fighter aircraft, focusing on options that match Canada’s defence needs."

Qualtrough said while they haven’t landed on an option to supplement the aging CF-18s, she said it’s going to happen.

The proposal of procuring the used Australian F/A-18s in the interim is "one of the options" they’re looking at, she said.

As well, the minister said she’s "100 per cent" open to procuring the F-35 through the open process, contradictory to the Liberal's initial pledge to not buy the Lockheed Martin stealth fighter-bomber.

"We’ve got to make sure we get our people these jets as soon as we possibly can, and we can’t wait," she said.

Full fleet replacement bid 'early 2019'

Qualtrough said the request for proposals for the full replacement of the fleet will "ideally" be launched in "early 2019," before the next federal election.

"In this mandate, that was our commitment and we’re going to stick to that," she said. "That’s still the target and we’re definitely on track to do that."

However, retired Major-General David Fraser said that plan doesn’t make sense at this time.

"I think having two fleets flying and then introducing a third fleet, economically it makes no sense whatsoever. We should actually just wait and have the competition now… the time is now to just make a decision on the final, not an interim," Fraser said in an interview airing on CTV's Question Period on Sunday.

Tune in to Question Period this Sunday on CTV News Channel, CTVNEWS.CA, and CTV News GO at 11 a.m. ET

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On 2017-10-17 at 7:34 AM, boestar said:

 

If the program takes off, so to speak. then is was a good deal for Airbus.  if, however, the plane becomes a dud then Airbus will lose right along with Bombardier and the Quebec government.

I think it would be just Bombardier and the Quebec government which will lose.

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  • 2 months later...

If this goes in favour of Boeing, will they  renew their action against Airbus? (see http://www.boeing.com/company/key-orgs/government-operations/wto.page)

Bombardier risks losing contested U.S. trade dispute with Boeing

U.S. government has moved to slap C Series with heavy duties on sales to American carriers

Thomson ReutersPosted: Jan 23, 2018 3:09 PM ET Last Updated: Jan 23, 2018 3:09 PM ET

Bombardier risks losing a hotly-contested U.S. trade dispute on Thursday which would effectively bar its C Series jet from the United States for at least a year, a potential setback as the Canadian plane-and-train maker races to meet its 2018 delivery targets and attract sales from American carriers.

The International Trade Commission's (ITC) ruling this week is unlikely to put an end to months of wrangling between Boeing Co., the world's largest maker of jetliners, and Bombardier, along with Canada and the United Kingdom, which have sided with the smaller planemaker.

The Boeing-Bombardier trade dispute has cast a shadow over the ongoing North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) modernization talks, which entered its sixth round this week in Montreal.

The ITC, which oversees U.S. trade remedy laws and sides more often with American companies, is expected by some experts to back the U.S. Commerce department's recommendation to slap Bombardier's C Series with a near 300-per cent duty on sales to American carriers.

Boeing has argued that its business was hurt because Bombardier received illegal government subsidies and dumped the C Series in the United States through the 2016 sale of 75 jets at "absurdly low prices" to Delta Air Lines.

For Bombardier to win, at least three of the body's four commissioners would have to rule for the Canadian planemaker.

"A tie vote goes to petitioners," said U.S. trade expert William Perry who believes Boeing will win the case.

But former ITC chairman Dan Pearson said he would not rule out a Bombardier victory in what's an "unusual" case for the commission.

"If I was there still, I'd be looking skeptically at Boeing's claims," he said.

The trade case has left Bombardier seeking delivery alternatives to Delta, which was supposed to start taking its C Series orders this year.

One option under consideration includes AeroMexico , which is 49-per cent owned by Delta, taking an unknown number of C Series, Reuters reported last year. .

But no decision has been made and AeroMexico could still buy jets from Bombardier's Brazilian rival Embraer SA, said a source familiar with the matter Reuters earlier this month.

 

Airbus-Bombardier deal 

A win for Boeing would not deter Bombardier from continuing to target U.S. airline customers. Bombardier has struck a deal with Airbus SE, expected to close this year, giving the European planemaker a majority stake in the C Series and the ability to assemble the planes in Alabama starting in 2019 for delivery to Delta.

While Bombardier says CSeries assembled in Alabama would be duty-free, Boeing has challenged those plans. The two planemakers have clashed on whether the case that mentions aircraft and "partially assembled" aircraft from Canada, would lead to duties on parts used in the CSeries.

Pearson said by email that foreign parts, like a wing made in Belfast, should not face a duty, but there could be charge on Canadian-made parts.

"This week's vote by the ITC is an opportunity to restore a level playing field and recommit to the global trading rules we have all agreed to," said Boeing spokesman Dan Curran on Tuesday.

But Bombardier called Boeing's trade case self-serving after the U.S. planemaker revealed on Dec. 21 it was discussing a "potential combination" with Embraer.

"This case is nothing more than Boeing's transparent attempt to misuse the U.S. trade laws to create an artificial market advantage for itself, including its recent move to acquire Embraer — the C Series' true competitor — while simultaneously trying to block the C Series from the U.S. market," Bombardier spokesman Mike Nadolski said by email.

Boeing spokesman Curran denied that the company's ongoing conversations with Embraer have anything to do with its case against Bombardier.

Embraer declined to comment.

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Some support for Bombardier:

Two US lawmakers throw support behind Bombardier in trade dispute

  • 23 January, 2018
  • SOURCE: Flight Dashboard
  • BY: Jon Hemmerdinger
  • Boston

Two US lawmakers have written the head of the US International Trade Commission to express support for Bombardier in that company's trade dispute with Boeing.

The letters from Alabama congressman Bradley Byrne and Kansas senator Jerry Moran – both Republicans – come days before four trade commissioners will vote on whether Bombardier's sale of CS100s to Delta Air Lines in 2016 caused harm to Boeing.

The ITC has scheduled the vote, which stands to affect four of the world's leading aircraft manufacturers, for 14:00 local time on 25 January in Washington DC. The trade body may, however, postpone the vote due to the recent US government shutdown, says the ITC.

If the commission decides that the deal did harm Boeing, the Bombardier CSeries would be subject to a 292% import tariff already set by the US Department of Commerce.

"This trade enforcement action would ultimately serve no other purpose than to take work away from US suppliers and quash thousands of US jobs, ultimately hurting the greater US aerospace industry," writes congressman Byrne in a 19 January letter to ITC chair Rhonda K. Schmidtlein.

"I am writing to underscore… the critical need for your deliberations to consider interests of the US aerospace industry as a whole," adds Byrne, who represents the district that includes Mobile, where Bombardier and Airbus are working to open a CSeries final assembly line.

His letter says the CSeries programme will support 22,700 jobs with US companies and generate $30 billion for US suppliers of components like engines, avionics, fuel systems and braking systems.

Boeing, which has some 140,000 US-based employees, dismisses the argument that a ruling against Bombardier would harm the US industry.

“The driving force of this trade case has always been a desire to ensure fair competition in the aerospace industry. This week’s vote by the ITC is an opportunity to restore a level playing field and recommit to the global trading rules we have all agreed to," Boeing tells FlightGlobal.

Kansas senator Moran's letter to commissioner Schmidtlein highlights articles that address Boeing's recently-reported desire to acquire a major stake in Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Embraer.

The articles cited by Moran present the argument that Boeing seeks to acquire Embraer because Embraer, unlike Boeing, makes aircraft that compete with CSeries. The articles also present the view Boeing's interest in Embraer increased when news broke that Airbus intends to acquire majority ownership of CSeries.

"The articles raise concerns about Boeing's intentions with its petition to the ITC and its motivations for trying to acquire Embraer, which manufactures an aircraft that competes directly with Bombardier CSeries," says Moran's letter.

Wichita, Kansas is home to Bombardier's Learjet division, and Bombardier has conducted CSeries test flights in the city.

Boeing's trade petition rests on the argument that the 737-700 and 737 Max 7 compete with CS100, and allegations that Bombardier's low-ball sales prices harmed 737 sales.

Boeing has repeatedly insisted that its talks with Embraer have "absolutely no bearing on the ITC proceedings".

Boeing chief executive Dennis Muilenburg told The Seattle Times on 22 January that Airbus' CSeries move did "not at all" trigger Boeing's interest in Embraer.

"This was something we've been working on for a long time," he told the news outlet.

Airbus and Bombardier announced in October they were pursuing a deal under which Airbus would acquire a majority ownership of CSeries and open a CSeries final assembly site in Mobile, which would free the aircraft from potential import duties.

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Saab threatens to suspend defense cooperation with Brazil if Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Embraer is bought by US Boeing. It is announcing Brazilian media today. Saab will deliver 36 fighter aircraft to Brazil and have started a technology transfer cooperation with Embraer - but now the deal is threatening. It is Brazil's largest newspaper, Folha de São Paulo, who today announced that Saab's CEO, Håkan Buskhe, asked for a meeting with Brazil's Defense Minister Raul Jungmann. According to Folha, the meeting will be held on Thursday. The newspaper writes that Swedes want to warn the Brazilian government for the consequences if US Boeing buys Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Embraer. It was 2013 that Saab, after several years of procurement, won the contract for 36 fighter aircraft, in fierce competition with French Dassault and US Boeing. The Brazilian government chose Saab because the Swedes promised to transfer technology and part of production to Brazil. The Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Embraer, who has both a civilian and a military part, has already begun a profound cooperation with Saab. But now the deal can be at risk. US Boeing is interested in buying Embraer, a major player in the small and medium-sized aircraft market. But Swedish Saab does not want to release corporate secrets to one of its competitors, and according to the Folha newspaper, the contract of the 36 fighter aircraft is likely to be demolished, even though it would be legally complicated. Embraer is a privately-owned and share-listed company, but the Brazilian government has a so-called golden share, giving them the right to veto business that can affect Brazil's defense. Saab and Boeing already have development cooperation in the United States, which Boeing used as an argument that the purchase of Embraer does not pose a threat to Saab. However, the Brazilian government is said to be adversely affected by the deal because they do not want the Americans to take part in Brazilian defense secrets. Experts in Brazil point out that Embraer's military and civilian part hangs intimately. Saab press officer Ann Wolgers tells Ekot that the company does not comment on this information in Brazilian media. "We are continuously meeting our partners in Brazil but do not comment on any individual meetings," she says.

 

Google translate...

 

http://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=83&artikel=6868476

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