Set up for failure

Great victory for Airbus today : China has signed a purchase order for 150 A320 airliners, together with an option for 20 of the future A350.
Great victory for China today : Airbus will build its first outbound manufacturing plant in Tianjin, to be operationnal by 2009.
The days of the supremacy of the aerospace giant are counted. Once the Chinese will know how to make an Airbus, they will produce their own airliners, 50% off the price of the earlier !
I have seen such a divestiture in another business : DSL filters, with the French (again) startup LEA. LEA is born in 1999, as the first DSL filters vendor in Europe. By 2001, LEA was worldwide leader, thanks to the boom of Broadband/xDSL everywhere on the Planet. Problem : LEA is a fab-less company. R&D 's done in Europe, but manufacturing is in China. Guess what : in 2004, the Chinese entered the european marketplace with filters 10 times cheaper than LEA's. Produced by the same firms, of course. By the end of 2005, LEA was forced to switch its business model for a new market segment (powerline communications).
Good job, Frenchies ! :-(