The purchase, for which financial details were not disclosed, signals the first step in a project that the Airbus Group, formerly known as European Aeronautic Defense and Space, began studying in 2010. That was during the depths of the European financial crisis, when lending was sharply curtailed to small and midsize businesses across the region. Business lending continues to remain weak across Europe, despite glimmers of an economic recovery.
Airbus relies on thousands of suppliers, many of them small and privately owned. The global boom in demand for new aircraft has put pressure on those suppliers to invest in new production capacity to keep pace. But those companies have struggled in recent years to raise the money necessary to make those investments. That has raised concerns that the group could face parts shortages as Airbus ramps up production in advance of a huge wave of commercial jet deliveries set to begin in 2015.
“Acquiring Salzburg München Bank provides us with a good platform to launch our company bank project,” Harald Wilhelm, Airbus’s chief financial officer said in a statement, adding that the purchase would also provide the group itself with increased financing flexibility.
A number of large European companies — including the industrial group Siemens and car makers like BMW, PSA Peugeot-Citroën and Volkswagen — have established their own banks in recent years. In addition to facilitating direct lending to suppliers, such banks also give companies the ability to borrow cash from the European Central Bank, at better rates than can be had in the corporate bond markets.
Airbus’s chief competitor, the American aviation giant Boeing, owns a large financial subsidiary, Boeing Capital. It arranges aircraft leases, third-party loans as well as in-house financing to airline customers. The unit manages a loan portfolio of around $4 billion.
By contrast, Airbus’s banking venture would be much more modest.
Salzburg München Bank, based in Munich, is a unit of the Austrian financial group Raiffeisenverband Salzburg, which had 6.5 billion euros, or $8.9 billion, in assets as of June 30, 2013. While the German bank unit focuses primarily on serving private banking clients in Bavaria and Austria, it also lends to small and midsize businesses. Salzburg München Bank gave loans of just under 300 million euros in 2012, according to its most recent annual report.
Martin Aguëra, a spokesman for the Airbus Group, stressed that the purchase of Salzburg München, which will be renamed Airbus Group Bank, did not signal an intention to move into the business of commercial aircraft financing.
“Our aircraft clients typically organize their own financing, and we do not intend to replace this,” Mr. Aguëra said.
The company said it expected the deal, which must still be approved by German banking and competition regulators, would close later this year.