the retention of production and engineering assets by the partner companies in effect made airbus industrie a sales and marketing company. this arrangement led to inefficiencies due to the inherent conflicts of interest that the four partner companies faced; they were both gie shareholders of, and subcontractors to, the consortium. the companies collaborated on development of the airbus range, but guarded the financial details of their own production activities and sought to maximise the transfer prices of their sub-assemblies. it was becoming clear that airbus was no longer a temporary collaboration to produce a single plane as per its original mission statement, it had become a long term brand for the development of further aircraft. by the late 1980s work had begun on a pair of new medium-sized aircraft, the biggest to be produced at this point under the airbus name, the airbus a330 and the airbus a340.