European Aeronautic Defence & Space Co (EADS), struggling with losses caused by the Airbus division's A380 plane delays, named Louis Gallois as sole chief executive officer.
Gallois, a 63-year-old Frenchman, has been chief of Airbus since October. Tom Enders, a 48-year-old German who until now has been co-chief executive of EADS along with Gallois, will run the planemaking unit, EADS said in a statement released before a meeting yesterday between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel at Airbus' Toulouse, France, headquarters.
The management overhaul was aimed at speeding up decision-making to win outside investors as Airbus seeks fresh capital to finance the planned A350 XWB airliner, a plane that will compete with Boeing Co's 787 Dreamliner.
EADS, Europe's biggest aerospace company, was formed when the French, German and Spanish partners in planemaker Airbus combined in July 2000. Under the merger agreement, the main German and French investors must hold equal stakes and are each represented by a joint chairman and co-CEO.
Ruediger Grube will become sole chairman under the new structure, EADS said.
Investors and analysts said communication and production troubles at Airbus, the world's biggest maker of commercial aircraft, stem partly from the political balancing act woven into EADS's governance and management.
Deliveries of the 555-seat A380 are two years late, leading to a 572 million euro (US$789 million) loss at Airbus last year. The plane will cause losses of 4.8 billion euros through 2010, EADS estimated in October. Delays were partly attributable to lack of communication within Airbus and EADS about the gravity of production problems as they developed.
CREDIT-GRABBER: China said its coast guard rescued the crew of a fishing vessel that caught fire, who were actually rescued by a nearby Taiwanese boat and the CGA Maritime search and rescue operations do not have borders, and China should not use a shipwreck to infringe upon Taiwanese sovereignty, the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) said yesterday. The coast guard made the statement in response to the China Coast Guard (CCG) saying it saved a Taiwanese fishing boat. The Chuan Yu No. 6 (全漁6號), a fishing vessel registered in Keelung, on Thursday caught fire and sank in waters northeast of Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台). The vessel left Keelung’s Badouzih Fishing Harbor (八斗子漁港) at 3:35pm on Sunday last week, with seven people on board — a 62-year-old Taiwanese captain surnamed Chang (張) and six
RISKY BUSINESS: The ‘incentives’ include initiatives that get suspended for no reason, creating uncertainty and resulting in considerable losses for Taiwanese, the MAC said China’s “incentives” failed to sway sentiment in Taiwan, as willingness to work in China hit a record low of 1.6 percent, a Ministry of Labor survey showed. The Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) also reported that the number of Taiwanese workers in China has nearly halved from a peak of 430,000 in 2012 to an estimated 231,000 in 2024. That marked a new low in the proportion of Taiwanese going abroad to work. The ministry’s annual survey on “Labor Life and Employment Status” includes questions respondents’ willingness to seek employment overseas. Willingness to work in China has steadily declined from
The Legislative Yuan’s Finance Committee yesterday approved proposed amendments to the Amusement Tax Act (娛樂稅法) that would abolish taxes on films, cultural activities and competitive sporting events, retaining the fee only for dance halls and golf courses. The proposed changes would set the maximum tax rate for dance halls and golf courses at 50 and 20 percent respectively, with local governments authorized to suspend the levies. Article 2 of the act says that “amusement tax shall be levied on tickets sold or fees charged by amusement places, facilities or activities” in six categories: “Cinema; professional singing, story-telling, dancing, circus, magic show, acrobatics
INFLATION UP? The IMF said CPI would increase to 1.5 percent this year, while the DGBAS projected it would rise to 1.68 percent, with GDP per capita of US$44,181 The IMF projected Taiwan’s real GDP would grow 5.2 percent this year, up from its 2.1 percent outlook in January, despite fears of global economic disruptions sparked by the US-Iran conflict. Taiwan’s consumer price index (CPI) is projected to increase to 1.5 percent, while unemployment would be 3.4 percent, roughly in line with estimates for Asia as a whole, the international body wrote in its Global Economic Outlook Report published in the US on Monday. The figures are comparatively better than the IMF outlook for the rest of the world, which pegged real GDP growth at 3.1 percent, down from 3.3 percent
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