Blog Unless There Is A Brexit Deal In The Offing, Airbus Has Threatened To Leave The UK. - Plimsoll Publishing UK

That’s a seismic shift in the UK’s engineering landscape. At a stroke that would wipe out the £1.4 billion Airbus pay into HM Treasury in tax revenues, eliminate 14000 direct jobs at Airbus UK and, perhaps most importantly, decimate over 100,000 jobs in their UK supply chain.

The UK’s leading market analysts Plimsoll have looked at the state of play across the engineering sectors to see which industries have the highest concentration of already distressed companies. This gauge of company strength across the sector acts as a barometer for the damage Airbus leaving would bring to this key part of the UK economy:

Christopher Evans, Senior Analysts at Plimsoll expands, “Airbus have already stated they have been forced to “press the button on crisis actions”. I imagine there have been some very nervous glances in the boardrooms of the more than 4000 businesses that make up Airbus’s supply chain”.

“Take the UK Laser Cutting market for instance. Almost a third of companies in that market are already in a financially weakened state. For those in the market feeding into the Airbus supply chain either directly or further downstream, this could be the final straw”.

Are all the companies feeding into Airbus though? Evans explains, “Of course not. But many of them will be and countless others will supply further down the supply chain. Even for those companies where Airbus represents only 5-10% of their turnover, if they are less than solid financially, that’s a big loss to survive”.

“It goes without saying that the impact if Airbus leaves the UK will be huge. This list we have provided here only looks at the Engineering based parts of the supply chain. That doesn’t take into account Recruitment Agencies, IT support services, Catering, Security, the list goes on. The business communities of Bristol, Stevenage, Portsmouth, North Wales and beyond will pay a heavy price indeed”.