Bombardier Aerospace announced on January 21st, 2014 that the company would layoff 1,700 employees to contain costs after stretching out CSeries development by at least 12 months and having aircraft orders decline in 2013. The company indicated that it would layoff 1,100 employees in Canada and 600 in the United States. Bombardier has 38,350 employees worldwide. The last round of layoffs occurred in 2007 during a financial crisis which found the company stopping new program development for one year. Following this event, the CSeries program was launched and Bombardier started hiring again.
The company said it had been making efforts to contain costs for the past year to 18 months in the face of massive development expenditures for the CSeries, Learjet 85 and Global 7000/8000 programs, as well as the upgraded Learjet 70/75 and Challenger 350 programs.
Bombardier delivered 238 aircraft in 2013, five more than the previous year, but 10 fewer than forecast because of issues with the certification program for the Learjet 70/75 aircraft. The company’s order book dropped from 481 aircraft to 388 and orders for commercial aircraft in that figure dropped from 138 to 81 aircraft.
