In 2005, the company announced the establishment of a joint venture that sought to produce the DA-40 light aircraft in China. In 2004, the company opened its new composites facility in Austria; it housed production of wings and fuselages for the DA42 and the in-development D-Jet, and supported Diamond's ambitions to boost annual production capacity to 600 aircraft, around half of which will be shipped to Canada for final assembly. Also during 2004, a new supply-orientated subsidiary, named Diamond Aircraft Croatia, was established to perform the manufacture of labour-intensive composite parts in a new purpose-built factory in Varaždin, Croatia. In December 2008, the company informed employees by mail that, as a consequence of the economic situation, they would be laying off 100 workers from the company's Austrian facility in Wiener Neustadt. At that time, the facility employed 700 of the company's 2,100 worldwide workforce. The wider market for general aircraft had plummeted as an impact of the Great Recession; the gradual recovery from this event would take many years and would not be without consequence on several of Diamond's existing production lines and development programmes. 2010s In March 2011, the president and CEO of Diamond Aircraft Canada, Peter Maurer, indicated that his company's future was in doubt and relied on getting the D-Jet to market, as piston sales remained slow since the start of the Great Recession in 2007. To get the D-Jet into production the company found $20M in private investment, plus the commitment of an additional $35M from the Government of Ontario. The Ontario government investment was contingent on Diamond also securing an additional $35M from the Government of Canada. If both federal and provincial loans were provided then, combined with funds already provided, the total provincial and federal government investment would have been $100M. Maurer indicated "If we don’t get the funding from the federal government, it puts us in a difficult situation. If the D-JET, for example, in a case scenario, were not to continue it would have a negative impact on the rest of the company’s operations. [The debts are] at a level that would be very difficult to satisfy out of piston sales," he said. "I’ll let you do the extrapolation." By the end of March 2011, with a federal election in full swing and no sign of the requested federal government loans coming, the company laid-off 213 London-based employees, mostly on the D-Jet