Airbus SE Chief Executive Officer Guillaume Faury cautioned that any potential tariffs between the U.S. and Europe could in fact be more problematic for his arch-rival, as U.S. President Donald Trump prepares to announce major levies across different industries early next month.
“Tariffs in the middle of the Atlantic would really be a big burden for both sides,” Faury said in a Bloomberg TV interview from Toulouse, France. “And maybe that will be even tougher for the U.S. manufacturer,” Boeing Co.
Airbus’s main factories are globally more spread out than Boeing’s, which only assembles its aircraft in the U.S. Airbus, by contrast, has final assembly lines in Europe and China and one in Mobile, Alabama, potentially giving it more leverage to mitigate the fallout from tariffs.
“We are key to the U.S. ecosystem, to the aviation ecosystem, and we think that plays big role in how tariffs are targeted,” Faury said. He said he’s encouraged that for now there hasn’t been talk of aviation-related tariffs.
Should such measures come into effect, they have proved in the past to benefit neither side, Faury said. Tariffs were a “lose-lose” situation when they were in place about five years ago before a “cease fire” was established, he said.
In the defense and space industries, Faury reiterated his call for European countries and companies to rally together on common products in order to create impact and security.
“Europe needs scale in terms of technologies,” Faury said. “We have very similar technologies, but its needs to go into a project at scale.”
“We’re too fragmented in defense in Europe,” he said.
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Hema Parmar and Guy Johnson, Bloomberg News
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