News
Weak demand for Lear 85s leads to cuts in Mexico, Kansas
Jan. 15, 2015, Montreal - Bombardier says it's going to cut about 1,000 employees from its Learjet business in 2015, affecting sites in Mexico and the United States.
January 15, 2015 By The Canadian Press
The Montreal-based aerospace company says the cuts are due to weak demand for the Learjet 85 business jet.
Bombardier will also write down the value of its Learjet 85 program, resulting in a pretax charge of about US$1.4 billion in the company’s fourth quarter.
The company will also record US$25 million for severance in its first quarter of 2015.
Bombardier says its operations in Wichita, Kansas and Queretaro, Mexico remain important to the company for both the Learjet and other types of aircraft that it makes.
The Wichita operation does final assembly for Learjet 70 and Learjet 75 aircraft and has a flight test centre and service centre.
The Queretaro operation makes a major component for the Global 7000 and 8000 business jets.
Bombardier is also doing final tests on the CSeries jets, a new generation of Bombardier aircraft for commercial airlines.
“Bombardier constantly monitors its product strategy and development priorities,” said Pierre Beaudoin, Bombardier’s president and chief executive officer.
“Given the weakness of the market, we made the difficult decision to pause the Learjet 85 program at this time. We will focus our resources on our two other clean-sheet aircraft programs under development, CSeries and Global 7000/8000, for which we see tremendous market potential. Both programs are progressing well.”
