In 2001, EADS (created by the merger of French, German and Spanish Airbus partner companies) and BAE Systems (the British partner company) transferred their Airbus production assets to a new company, Airbus SAS. In return, they got 80% and 20% shares respectively. BAE would later sell its share to EADS.
Coopetition is a word coined from cooperation and competition. It is used when companies otherwise competitors collaborate in a consortium to cooperate on areas non strategic for their core businesses. They prefer to reduce their costs on these non strategic areas and compete on other areas where they can differentiate better.
For example, the GENIVI Alliance is a not-for-profit consortium between different car makers in order to ease building an in-vehicle infotainment system. Another example is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is a consortium that standardizes web technologies like HTML, XML and CSS.
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