What Hans Ring was saying in the sentence you pointed to is that Airbus hopes to break even on the production cost of an individual aircraft by 2015. Which means that today it costs Airbus more to manufacture an A380 than they sold it for, ignoring R&D costs.
As they gain experience, the production cost will go down, and by 2015 it should cost less to make than the aircraft sold for. Then you can begin to recoup your R&D costs, which is why they need to sell at least 420 aircraft to break even for the entire A380 project.
But first they have to win 420 orders, which is not going to happen by 2015.
With the world economy where it is, I believe you are correct. I doubt they will sell 420 of the A380’s in the next 5 years.
But, the manufacturing skills they have developed for the A380 should be able to be leveraged against other aircraft in their portfolio. Future revisions of their aircraft should benefit from the lessons learned in building the A380.