Coronavirus has not broken our supply chain, says Airbus

Airbus, the European aircraft manufacturer, says that the coronavirus outbreak in China has not affected its supply chain.

“We have redundancy plans. Even if one region is isolated, we still supply spare parts from all over the world. This has been in place for a while,” a senior Airbus official told BusinessLine at the ongoing airshow which opened here on Thursday.

Making it clear that he would not like to comment on China but on Airbus, Anand Stanley, President and Managing Director, Airbus India and South Asia, said: “Our spares network is global in nature. It has multiple sourcing including India where we have a significant amount of our spares and components base. It (sourcing of spares) is very global in nature. I would like to state that when it comes to Airbus, its spares and services network is very global in nature and it ensures that we have a minimum amount of reliability and availability. We do not depend on any one particular country,” Stanley said.

Sourcing from India to go up

Airbus also announced that it has increased its sourcing from India to around $650 million annually. Asked how the earlier figure of $500 million of annual sourcing had reached $650 million, Stanley pointed out that that he would not look at it as an incremental gap as it is a mix of Make in India and Design in India. “The design in India component has been growing at a fairly exponential rate to the point where we believe in the next five years the $650 million can easily cross a $1 billion,” he added.

Meanwhile, Airbus expects that India will require about 1,900 aircraft in the next 20 years.

Of these, up to 20 per cent could be wide-bodied ones. Some 1,440 aircraft are for growth and 440 are needed to replace aircraft that will be retired. Taking into account the retirement of 440 aircraft, India’s existing domiciled fleet of 510 aircraft will quadruple to 1,950 by 2038, according to the Airbus forecast.

“We are bullish on the Indian civil aviation and expect to deliver about one aircraft a week to India over the next 10 years. India is at the forefront of global aviation growth and Airbus is proud to partner it as the country’s aircraft of choice,” Stanley said.

He further stated, “Today, every Airbus Commercial aircraft is partly made in India and we are working to double our sourcing volumes from the country to more than $1 billion by 2025.”

Sharing India highlights, he said Airbus aircraft represent some 80 per cent of India’s order backlog and nearly 65 per cent in-service fleet. It has predicted a 7.7 per cent annual growth in passenger traffic as against global average of 4.3 per cent. Airbus provides employment to secures over 7,000 people including 1,500 engineers in India.