PARIS (AFP) — The European aerospace giant EADS hopes to achieve a double-digit operating margin by around 2015, a company spokesman said Thursday.
He said EADS should record double-digit margins, which it has never done in its eight-year history, "in the middle of the next decade."
The newspaper Financial Times Deutschland had reported earlier that in a strategic plan to be presented next month, EADS would reveal that it did not expect to achieve double-digit operating margins before 2015 because of the strength of the euro.
The paper cited a comment from EADS chief executive Louis Gallois that appeared in a company publication.
The report dragged down the EADS share price on Thursday, which had fallen 1.06 percent to 22.32 euros by mid-day on a generally stronger Paris market.
At its creation nearly eight years ago, the European Aeronutic Defence and Space Company, which controls aircraft manufacturer Airbus, had set itself an operating margin target of 10 percent.
To date its best performance was in 2005, when the margin came to 8.3 perecent before plunging to around 1.0 percent in 2006 on costly delays in the Airbus A380 superjumbo program.
EADS has also been hurt by the strong euro.
The rise of the single currency against the dollar, according to EADS management, has cut deeply into the value of repatriated dollar earnings. EADS sells its products in dollars but must pay its costs in euros.
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