Airbus delivered 36 commercial aircraft in June, the company reported Wednesday, as a marginal degree of recovery in the context of the Covid-19 epidemic resulted in a slight increase in shipments compared with May, when it delivered 24 airplanes, and April, when it delivered 14. During the first half of the year, Airbus delivered a total of 196 airplanes, including 157 A320-family and 11 A220 narrowbodies. Five A330s and 23 A350s accounted for the balance of the shipments.

At the same time, Airbus booked a total of 298 net orders for commercial aircraft, compared with 389 in the first half of 2019. Airbus attributed the decrease solely to the Covid-19 crisis.

In February the company issued a delivery target of about 880 commercial jets this year, up 2 percent on the 863 shipments in 2019, which at the time set a company record and amounted to an 8 percent increase over 2018 deliveries.

However, late last month the company reported a 40-percent decline in business activity since the onset of the Covid-19 crisis and said it would adjust production to match that rate. The announcement of those cuts followed the company’s announcement in early April of a plan to reduce production by about a third throughout its product line. 

“Airbus is facing the gravest crisis this industry has ever experienced,” said Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury in a June 30 statement. “The measures we have taken so far have enabled us to absorb the initial shock of this global pandemic. Now, we must ensure that we can sustain our enterprise and emerge from the crisis as a healthy, global aerospace leader, adjusting to the overwhelming challenges of our customers. To confront that reality, we must now adopt more far-reaching measures.”

Those measures include plans to cut 15,000 jobs around the world, affecting 5,000 employees in France, 5,100 in Germany, 1,700 in the UK, 900 in Spain, and 1,300 at other sites. The figures include Airbus subsidiaries Stelia in France and Premium Aerotec in Germany, although they do not include some 900 positions stemming from a pre-Covid decision to restructure Aerotec. Those cuts will now happen within the timeframe of the larger plan.