You are probably right. From what I have seen in 20+ years of business dealings, everything a Chinese company does is to make money (obviously), and with every year that goes by they want to make the money even faster. Employee turnover down there is massive.
On the plus side, assets will be sold at low prices. So e.g. Textron, having failed with the TTX, may want to do the blindingly obvious and buy a factory which makes planes with a parachute 
Whether anybody will want to buy Mooney when the Chinese head for the back door, is a good Q. Probably a keen Mooney owner with a few $M.
US AOPA story
It basically says they sent everybody home.
The US GA industry is hardly going to dry up and blow away if the Chinese investments fail. Fairly obviously, in the real world, Chinese acquisition of US aircraft companies has been a way for the owners to extract the last and highest dollar from a near valueless asset. The only exception might be Cirrus with Continental engines, which although the big sales seem to be in the past is making enough new planes to sustain itself. Chinese owned Diamond (by which I mean the Canadian operation selling into the US) doesn’t seem to be making a noticeable number of planes.
Meanwhile Cessna, Beech and Lycoming don’t get sold to the Chinese because the operation including the jet business makes enough planes and money. The main activity in new, small GA is with LSA Cubs and Homebuilt RVs, both with Lycoming engines.
The Chinese probably have massive excess dividends and convert those into a diversified range of real assets. I guess to leverage against euro/dollar. The sums to acquire Cirrus, Diamond etc.. are negligible compared to other purchases so they just snap them up with spare change. I don’t think that developing GA in China has anything to do with it. OTOH R&D and transferring tech knowledge (or better put: accelerating it) to China (for whatever reason, military, consumer goods etc..) is more likely. Invest into 1000 things, 999 fail, but one puts you at the top worldwide for some tech, than the rest we’re simply a collateral.
Folks,
in the mean time I got some figures which make the whole thing even weirder. According to one of the FI’s who coaches new Ultra pilots, the figures for this year posted in several sources are off by some margin. All together 28 Ultras have been delivered to date, 6 more are on firm order of which 3 appear to be ready for delivery. Dealerships for Mooney point out that they were totally surprised by the move as they consider the sales and delivery schedules even too slow for their liking, that is they could sell more airplanes than Mooney can actually produce. Also, apparently there was the intention of further modifications on the Ultras to create extra payload and possibly other improvements.
Given this, it is really a very strange move at this time. 6 undelivered but firm ordered airplanes mean close to 5 Million $ in assets which need delivery.
It will be crucial to see if the factory reopens on Monday, as originally announced that the outage would be for one week. What has happened within that week is anyone’s guess right now.
Doesn’t matter too much if it’s been 2, 5 or 20 planes.
According to latest reports, the manufacturing site in Kerrville had 229 Employees. Even at Kentucky rates for skilled labor, that is a cost of clearly more than USD 10 mio. Assuming that at least 50% of the cost of the plane is external materials cost (Engine, Avionics, etc.), they don’t even earn direct labour cost if they deliver 20 planes with that.
Just as a comparison: Cirrus has about 1300 Employees (not only production of course) to deliver nearly 400 Aircraft a year – that’s 70 deliveries per 229 Employees!
According to Moonespace, a notice has been posted that the factory will not reopen on Monday.
https://mooneyspace.com/topic/32198-factory-closed-down/?do=findComment&comment=544261
Well, the Mooney factory appears to be open and producing airplanes again since today. This according to Mooneyspace.
Nobody still knows what happened in the two weeks they were closed. They are absolutely not communicating at all. But at least the workers are back at work and for the moment we don’t have to worry about Mooney becoming orphaned.
https://dailytimes.com/promotions/article_f44f402c-153a-11ea-960f-3b4021e27776.html local copy
Good news…I guess…
Still looks like gambling with trust to me.
They just shut down for good according Aviationweek.
AdamFrisch wrote:
They just shut down for good according Aviationweek.
Where does it say that? Only article I could find was from Nov 28
