Engineering giant Rolls-Royce is feeling the pain of the pandemic.
The aerospace manufacturer has plunged to a loss of £4bn in the last financial year as air travel restrictions remain in place across the globe.
Chief executive Warren East said 2020 was "unprecedented", with the impact of Covid "felt most acutely" by the firm's civil aerospace business.
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The company, which has 海角视频 bases in Derby, in the East Midlands, and Filton, near Bristol, is undergoing a huge restructure in a bid to cut costs and future-proof the business.
Last year, Rolls-Royce announced plans to shed 9,000 jobs from its global workforce of 52,000. Then, in November, it said it was cutting another 1,400 roles, including 950 jobs in its civil aerospace division worldwide, including in the 海角视频, and a further 420 across its global facilities.
But it is not the first time in its history Rolls-Royce has been under significant financial strain. Fifty years ago the business went bankrupt.
In the lead up to its 1971 collapse, Rolls-Royce racked up huge losses developing the RB211 turbofan engine for US aerospace company Lockheed Aircraft Corporation’s new L-1011 TriStar - a medium-to-long-range trijet airliner.
According to Dr Steve Wright, an aerospace expert at the University of the West of England, who worked at Rolls-Royce in the late 1980s, the company was attempting to use a new manufacturing technique that didn’t work.
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The business was forced to liquidate and was later bailed out by Prime Minister Edward Heath’s Conservative government after politicians called it a "major national tragedy". The business remained nationalised until 1987.
But, 50 years on from its bankruptcy, what does the future hold for Rolls-Royce?
Dr Wright believes the company’s prospects are “much more sanguine” today.
“You can hang on by your fingernails because nothing happens quickly in the aerospace industry. Every 10 or 12 years the world airline industry is hit by some major shock [but] the aviation economy always catches back up.
“I don’t think the current crisis is an existential threat. We’re halfway through two years of pain and it’s hurting.”
One of the reasons Rolls-Royce is particularly vulnerable to the switching off of air travel, according to Dr Wright, is because it leases its engines to airlines, which pay a fee for every hour they are in the air.
“So if planes aren’t flying [Rolls-Royce] isn’t getting paid,” he explained. “When this spigot of cash gets turned back on, they are quite well positioned to take it up quickly as they are closely tied into the airline market. It crashed quickly and it will climb out quickly as well.”
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Rolls-Royce appears to be investing heavily in green technology too. But will the aerospace giant be shifting its focus to concentrate its operations in this area in the longer term?
The company has already announced its technology will be used to power a drone-like all-electric ‘flying taxi’ that is being developed in Bristol. And, earlier this month, it said the world’s fastest all-electric plane was a matter of weeks from taking to the air for the first time.
According to Dr Wright, Rolls-Royce’s foray into electric technologies is a “probing exercise”.
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“It’s decades away before [that type of technology] becomes bigger than gas turbines, which is what is used for our current engines.
“It’s not easy for a company of Rolls-Royce’s size to manoeuvre. The announcements around electric is the company’s way of declaring its intent about spreading its bets for the future.
“The electric story is interesting - it’s novel and it has the capability to change the way we live our lives, but it’s going to take 10 years to play out at least. Rolls-Royce just needs to hang in there for now.”