Good news to see Airbus taking risks and being offensive instead of just taking orders (and checks 
What I can’t believe is that Airbus won’t put cash into the C-Series :
Incidentally LeSving I meant to ask you about a very good Norwegian cheese I once tasted at a dispatchers meeting in Haugesund… They called it something like old cheese. You know what it is?
Jujupilote wrote:
Building an assembly line in Mobile won’t be free.
Neither is paying a tariff free, which (BTW and regardless of whether you like tariffs or not) seems to indicate that the threat of a tariff moves things in the direction intended. I’d guess that if the threat is real (who knows if it is) Airbus will make a deal to get some money from the (US) state or Federal government for production to move to the US. It’ll be interesting to watch
LeSving wrote:
Yes, but to call it “good” you need to have a very peculiar taste
LOL, well we only had it once and it was referred to as the “food of Odin”. The drink was Cod liver oil.. I still have the diploma that I survived both and my wife actually went back for 2nds.
Jujupilote wrote:
What I can’t believe is that Airbus won’t put cash into the C-Series :This plane is certainly good, but it is only sold at a loss now (below its cost).
Building an assembly line in Mobile won’t be free.
They certainly will, even if they took over the rights for naught… but it makes sense. With Airbus marketing power and know how there is a good chance the C-Series will get the place it deserves.
I wonder what Boeing/Trump’s next idea will be to hamper it now that it will be built in the US. Could become interesting indeed.
I see alot of animosity towards Boeing and I definitely think their approach was poorly planned, but looking at who owns the other 50% of Cseries their argument sees pretty clear. Bombardier isn’t getting tax incentives it gets direct tax payer injections of cash. Doesn’t anyone find that a bit fishy, and non-capitalist?
How about this, what if instead of Cseries the situation was with COMAC. Would everyone here run to COMAC’s defense and attack Boeing? Boeing and Bombardier bring a lot of jobs to the UK so I get the passion and arguments.
Either way, Airbus won big, Bombardier won big, and the Cseries has a new injection of life (albeit from French taxpayers now instead of Quebec). It’ll be cool to see another plane in the sky pushing aviation into the next century.
SEATACmech wrote:
Cseries has a new injection of life (albeit from French taxpayers now instead of Quebec)
Airbus does not live off French taxpayer money, it generates profits that go to the French taxpayer as dividends. The money that Airbus tends to get is usually in the form of loans which can be a subsidy, too because they don’t follow market principles for risk assessment and premium.
The government of Québec is a shareholder. The state is often a shareholder, especially in socialist countries like France China. That was a good move in hindsight because it allowed Bombardier to bring the project to a level where a private organization acquired it. The government of Québec has already confirmed that Airbus has an option to take 100% within 10 years.
Boeing is at least as much at the receiving end of government subsidies as Airbus. That’s just how the game works on all sides. The risks and budgets of a project like the A380 are beyond what a private corporation can manage.
SEATACmech wrote:
Bombardier isn’t getting tax incentives it gets direct tax payer injections of cash. Doesn’t anyone find that a bit fishy, and non-capitalist?
It depends on the details that frankly I’m not able to judge, and that are maybe not completely objectively measurable. This is not free cash, not a low-interest loan. The Quebec province got equity out of this. So the question is: is this equity worth the cash they injected, for some definition of “worth”? If it is, there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. Sovereign funds invest in companies all the time. That is also capitalism.
What definition of “worth” should be used?
Does my gut feeling tell me that Quebec did it purely for capitalistic grounds? No. Do I have the data to back my gut feeling? No. But even following my gut feeling, if the equity they got is worth the cash, it is fine. Just like the bank bail outs around 2008. The states certainly didn’t do it out of capitalistic reasons. But they did a significant profit on it. Loans with (figuratively speaking) usury interest rates, paid back, in full, interest and capital, while the state was itself borrowing at far lower interest rates. Banks bought for pennies and sold for dollars.
SEATACmech wrote:
isn’t getting tax incentives it gets direct tax payer injections of cash
not THAT different, is it? In the end, there is a budget. You take less from a company, you need to find the rest elsewhere. I can think of arguments on the other side (such as, “if you have a start state and a company comes and says we’ll create 10k jobs if you don’t let us pay taxes”, then you can argue that you likely just improved the start state). However, It’s likely very complicated, as you can’t compare fiscality / benefits in these 2 cases, they are not apple to apple. I don’t know how the military “subsidies” flow into the civil part, but I imagine there is at least some synergy.
In the end, probably no one is “right” and it boils down to a chess game, mostly of politics / lawyers.
SEATACmech wrote:
How about this, what if instead of Cseries the situation was with COMAC. Would everyone here run to COMAC’s defense and attack Boeing?
Have you not seen the recent Joint Venture news?
