EADS expects to complete the sale of a large part of its Airbus site at Filton in the UK "in the next few weeks" to GKN in spite of its failure to reach deals for other important Airbus sites in France and Germany.

GKN, the UK automotive and aerospace supplier, is aiming to take 100 per cent control of the Airbus UK wing component and subassembly manufacturing site at Filton, near Bristol.

EADS said yesterday it also expected to agree the sale shortly of its smaller Airbus site at Laupheim in Germany.

GKN is expected to spend around €200m ($309m) to take over the Filton site, which will become its biggest single aerospace manufacturing plant and will increase the group's aerospace turnover by more than a third. It will add between 1,600 and 1,800 workers to the existing GKN Aerospace global workforce of 8,500 and add £300m ($583m) to the division's turnover, which reached £820m last year.

Airbus had hoped to sell off several components manufacturing plants in Germany, France and the UK as part of the restructuring of its industrial operations across Europe.

The Airbus Power8 restructuring programme is aimed at making overall cost savings of €2.1bn by 2010 and at eliminating 10,000 jobs, separately to the plant sell-offs, mainly from overhead and administrative staff and including 5,000 temporary contract workers.

EADS said yesterday its Airbus restructuring programme was "progressing" despite its recent decision to break off talks with Latécoère in France for the sale of sites at Méaulte and Saint Nazaire Ville, and with MT Aerospace in Germany for the sale of sites at Augsburg, Nordenham and Varel.

The French and German plants would be carved out into separate subsidiaries and would be sold at a later date, it said.

The cost and cash savings targets of the Power8 programme were being left unchanged despite the breakdown of the sell-offs in Germany and France.

EADS yesterday reported first quarter operating earnings of €769m from €88m in the same period a year ago, when it has hit by a one-off charge of €688m for the Power8 restructuring programme.

The group said it expected its operating profit (before goodwill and exceptional charges) to rise to €1.8bn for the whole of 2008, after a steep fall in the past two years and a decline last year to €52m from €399m a year earlier.

In the first quarter EADS' net income rose to €285m from a net loss of €10m a year ago. Earnings per share rose to 35 cents from a loss of one cent per share a year ago.

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