Airbus is seeking to reduce its potential exposure to US tariffs on aircraft, but chief executive Guillaume Faury is opposed to a sweeping European Union retaliation.
While Faury supports the EU’s considering tariffs on US aircraft imports, he believes extending them to components and subsystems would be counterproductive.
“We are not recommending anybody, including EU, [should] tariff equipment, systems, whatever, coming from the US going to Europe,” he said, speaking to FlightGlobal ahead of the Paris air show.
“We’re not interested in damaging the European industry as much as the US tariffs have damaged the US industry.”
The Trump administration’s on-off tariff barrage extended to the EU earlier this year, although certain threatened duties have been suspended to allow time for negotiations.
Faury says the tariff situation is “quite dynamic” and that Airbus’s priorities are to “monitor, understand and adapt”.
He points out that 80% of the company’s aircraft activity – and more in terms of production – is not US-based. But it has US final assembly lines for the A320neo and A220.
“These are the activities mostly impacted – plus what we deliver from Europe to the US,” he says, including a number of A320neo and A321neo jets, as well as widebodies to Delta Air Lines.
Faury says the airframer is working with its customers to identify solutions, drawing on its previous experience with aerospace tariffs which arose in 2019 as a result of a long-fought World Trade Organization dispute.
“We’re sort of trying to do the same,” says Faury. “It’s a broader and more complex picture – not only tariffs on [aircraft], it’s tariffs across the board.”
He points out that the tariffs have several layers – their precise application depends on such aspects as the USMCA free-trade agreement, relevant to Canada, where Airbus manufacturers A220s.
Goods-returned relief becomes a consideration with imports containing a certain quantity of US content, while a duty drawback cancels tariffs on imported systems which are then installed in an exported aircraft.
“There is a world of complexity and I’m just scratching the surface of that complexity,” says Faury. But he believes the tariffs are “primarily hurting the US industry”.
“We’re looking at what needs to be done to reduce exposure to tariffs, and there are plenty of options,” he says.
“The point is, to trigger those options, you need to decide whether you assume we have a short-term issue that will go away – you just wait for things to get better – or you make the assumption we’re here to stay with tariffs on the long run.
“You have to buy in the US when you’re manufacturing in the US, and delivering to the US, and you have to consider that the rest is a separate activity to be de-risked on US tariffs.”
