Airbus says no longer in discussions with Bombardier

Both companies acknowledged that talks had taken place. The company has already said it would sell a minority stake in its train-equipment business.

Boeing enjoys closer relations with Bombardier’s arch-rival Embraer of Brazil, and is seen as less likely to be interested in any tie-up with Bombardier.

Bombardier shares jumped 13 percent on the Toronto Stock Exchange immediately after Reuters reported the approach, ending the day up 15 percent at C$1.77. Bombardier last signed a deal for the CSeries in September 2014, when a unit of Australia’s Macquarie Group Ltd. agreed to buy 40 of the jets.

Bombardier has approached European planemaker Airbus about selling a majority stake in the Canadian company’s CSeries jet, people familiar with the matter said, in a radical bid to prevent its aerospace ambitions being crushed by cash shortages.

“Such discussions are no longer being pursued”, Airbus said Tuesday in a statement.

So far Bombardier has just 243 firm orders for the CS100 model that is scheduled to be certified this year and enter into service by mid-2016.

Even for an industry prone to long delays and cost overruns, the development of the CSeries has been rocky.

In August, Moody’s warned that Bombardier’s cash position could decline to a minimum level of $2 billion next August, given current spending trends.

“To make this a commercially viable program, you need somebody with deep pockets to be on your team”, Nicholas Heymann, an analyst at William Blair & Co., said in a telephone interview from New York.