Airbus to cut more than 2,000 jobs in Europe

Planned staff cuts in the European locations of Airbus will mean just under 2,050 fewer jobs in the defence and aerospace division but no redundancies, it was announced on Thursday.

Following the presentation of the restructuring programme to the works council of Airbus’ German locations, its chairman Thomas Pretzl said that 689 jobs would be affected in Germany and 1,354 in the UK, France and Spain.

“We were able to rule out compulsory redundancies even before the negotiations began,” said Pretzl.

In October, Airbus announced a total of up to 2,500 job cuts in the division by mid-2026; The company is now talking about a total of 2,043 jobs, mainly in administration and the aerospace sector.

“Due to the existing workload, we criticize the job cuts, the renewed reorganization within a year and the inadequate representation of German managers in the management of the space division,” said Pretzl.

He called on German politicians to “position themselves accordingly for the jobs, locations and technologies.”

Airbus’ defence and space division employs around 35,000 people in Europe. While the military aircraft and cybersecurity business is doing well, the space division had to record high write-downs in the first half of the year.

The telecommunications and navigation satellite business is also under pressure from growing competition and new technologies.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX group in the US is now the largest satellite operator in the world. The market for traditional high-altitude geostationary satellites, on the other hand, has halved in recent years.

Airbus now wants to give the individual areas of the aerospace division more autonomy and streamline the organizational structure in order to assert itself in the rapidly changing market.