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Q1 2025 Boeing Co Earnings Call

In This Article:

Participants

Matthew Welch; Vice President of Investor Relations; Boeing Co

Kelly Ortberg; President and Chief Executive Officer; Boeing Co

Brian West; Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President; Boeing Co

Douglas Harned; Analyst; Bernstein

Myles Walton; Analyst; Wolfe Research

Seth Seifman; Analyst; JPMorgan

Scott Deuschle; Analyst; Deutsche Bank

Sheila Kahyaoglu; Analyst; Jefferies

Scott Mikus; Analyst; Melius Research LLC

David Strauss; Analyst; Barclays

Noah Poponak; Analyst; Goldman Sachs

Peter Arment; Analyst; Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc.

Robert Stallard; Analyst; Vertical Research Partners

Richard Safran; Analyst; Seaport Global Securities LLC

Presentation

Operator

Thank you for standing by. Good day, everyone, and welcome to The Boeing Company's first-quarter 2025 earnings conference call. (Operator Instructions) Please be advised that today's call is being recorded. The management discussion and slide presentation, plus the analyst question-and-answer session, are being broadcast live over the Internet. (Operator Instructions)
At this time, I'm turning the call over to Mr. Matt Welch, Vice President of Investor Relations for opening remarks and introductions. Mr. Welch, please go ahead.

Matthew Welch

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Boeing's quarterly earnings call. With me today are Kelly Ortberg, Boeing's President and Chief Executive Officer; and Brian West, Boeing's Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. This quarter's webcast, earnings release and presentation, which include relevant disclosures and non-GAAP reconciliations are available on our website.
Today's discussion includes forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainty, including the ones described in our SEC filings.
As always, we will leave time at the end of the call for analyst questions. With that, I will turn the call over to Kelly Ortberg.

Kelly Ortberg

Thanks, Matt, and thanks to everyone for joining in today's call. Let me start out by saying that we had a really solid quarter of performance across the business, and I'm pleased to report that our recovery plan is in full swing and showing signs that it's being effective.
Albeit early, I do like what I'm seeing. In BCA, we continue to implement our safety management system and remain on schedule with our safety and quality plan that we've established with the FAA. The key performance indicators that we're using to measure our production stability continue to progress and we delivered 130 airplanes in the quarter, which was better than our internal plan.
I want to remind you that we plan to ramp up conservatively so that we had some capacity to deal with unknown challenges. In BDS, we had improved performance on our fixed price development programs and held our EACs for the quarter.
We continue to make progress on our active management approach on the programs to improve performance and reduce our future EAC risks. And of course, winning the F-47 program was a transformational accomplishment to be selected the contractor for the world's first sixth-generation fighter is a testament to our focused investment in some pretty difficult time and to our dedicated team. This will secure our fighter franchise for decades to come.
And our BGS business continued to deliver strong results, and we reached a milestone event by delivering our 100th 767 freighter conversion. So let me dig a little deeper into our 4-point plan for our recovery. Recall from previous calls that I highlighted four key areas: the first, stabilizing our business; second, improving the development program execution; third, changing our culture; and fourth, building our new future.
So for stabilizing our business, our balance sheet has been an important focus. The FTD RAYS at the end of last year was sized to provide us the ability to restore our production system to help. With the better-than-expected delivery performance, we naturally had less drain on cash in the first quarter so we continue to be on solid footing here.
As we announced yesterday, the expected divestiture of portions of our digital aviation solutions business will also provide a significant cash infusion. The key to cash generation will be continued progress on the 737 MAX ramp. We are currently producing in the low 30s per month and expect that we'll get to the 38 per month cap over the next few months. We'll ensure that the KPIs are showing a stable production system and then request an increase to 42 per month with the FAA later this year.
We've stayed very close to the new Department of Transportation and FAA leadership, and we remain aligned on the criteria to move to the next rate. If you look back before the strike last fall, we've seen about a 50% reduction in traveled work and a 25% reduction in rework hours on the 737 line.
So the changes we've made to strengthen our quality system are delivering results. Even more importantly, almost every customer I talk with report an improvement to the quality of the airplanes. On 787, we continue to produce at five per month, and I'm pleased to report that we've completed the work on the last joint verification airplane in Everett, which now allows us to close our shadow factory and redeploy the people and facilities dedicated to that work.
We're poised to move to seven per month this year, provided our KPIs indicate a stable production system, and they're currently looking very good. As we highlighted last quarter, we continue to work through seat certification issues affecting some deliveries, and I expect this will be a challenge for us for the balance of the year.
With the current cash balance and the production ramp status, I feel we are well on our way to stabilizing the business even in the face of the tariff situation, which I'll address in a moment. Now let me switch to the next priority, which is improving the development program execution. As I mentioned, a quarter with EAC stability in defense is a good start, but our efforts run deeper than that.
During the last quarter, I mentioned that we had reached an MOA with the customer on the T-7 program, for which we termed active management . And we've since completed our first two incentive milestones associated with that agreement. On VC-25B, we continue to work with the customer to revise the program plan to allow for an earlier first delivery while maintaining our focus on safety and quality.
And we recently transferred our MQ-25 aircraft to our new production facility in Illinois to begin final assembly, which is the last production step before we move to ground and flight test later this year. And this next quarter will be an important one for us as we begin to baseline the performance of our F-47 plan.
On commercial development programs, we reached authorization from the FAA to expand the 777X flight test activities to include additional aerodynamics, brakes and engines. The aircraft are flying daily and performing well in flight testing.
Along with the 777X, the 737-7 and the 737-10 continue with their certification programs and there is no change to our previously shared certification time line on any of the commercial programs. So while there's still a tremendous amount of work to do across all of our development programs, I am seeing an improved sense of urgency around the baseline management and risk management on these programs.
Now the third area of focus is changing the culture at Boeing, and we've made some good progress there as well. In the quarter, we had a series of employee meetings talking specifically about culture change. We formed an enterprise working group to help us refresh our values and behaviors. And we've recently completed an all-employee survey, the first in five years and got very constructive feedback on what's needed to improve the future of our company.
We've introduced the new values and behaviors to the entire organization, and we'll be incorporating those into our new performance management system, our leadership training and leadership selection criteria. Our people are passionate about the culture change, so I really want to seize the moment to make the necessary changes within the company.
Now the last area to discuss is building our future. The planned divestiture of portions of our digital aviation solutions business is an example of the portfolio streamlining that I highlighted on earlier calls. There are a couple more steps that we are considering in this regard to help us keep focus on the right products and capabilities for Boeing's future.
And obviously, the F-47 win is a key step for building our future, cementing our franchise in the fighter business. So that brings me to the current tariff environment and the impact to our plan. I would break this down into two categories, input tariffs that affect our cost to manufacture our products and then the potential impact of retaliatory tariffs like those we are seeing in China.
Brian will walk you through the financials, but the input tariffs incurred in the first quarter were immaterial, and we really didn't see any impact to deliveries in the first quarter. Much of our supply chain is based in the United States, and many of our imports from Canada and Mexico are exempt under the USMCA agreement. We do have suppliers in countries subject to the new US tariffs, most notably in Japan and Italy, where our suppliers do significant structures work on our wide-body airplanes.
We are currently paying the 10% tariff on those components, but we should recover tariff costs for those aircraft that are subsequently exported which is a large portion of our widebodies. I hope over time that these tariffs can be resolved through negotiated agreements, but until that happens, we will have to manage our way through these increased input costs.
The other issue is impact of potential retaliatory tariffs from other countries, which could affect our ability to deliver aircraft. The only region that we have an issue with aircraft delivery today is China, and due to the tariffs, many of our customers in China have indicated that they will not take delivery. Given the uncertainty, we are taking a very straightforward approach to dealing with these deliveries.
We have approximately 50 China deliveries in our plan for the balance of the year. We're in close communication with our China customers, and we're actively assessing options for remarketing already built or in-process airplanes. And for the nine airplanes not yet in the production system, we're engaged with our customers to understand their intentions for taking delivery and if necessary, we have the ability to assign those positions to other customers.
It's an unfortunate situation, but we have many customers who want near-term deliveries, so we plan to redirect the supply to the stable demand. And we're not going to continue to build aircraft for customers who will not take them.
We founded our exposure and until we get more clarity, we're going to do our best to keep the China situation from impacting our production flow. We've put in place a conservative recovery plan this year, anticipating some perturbations or risk. So I feel really good about our overall plan for the year even though I expect the China situation, we'll take away some of the headroom we've built with our strong first quarter deliveries at BCA.
We continue to work this situation proactively with the administration, and it's clear that they understand the importance of the aerospace industry to the US economy and the role that Boeing plays as a top US exporter.
So before I wrap up my prepared remarks, I want to recognize and thank our employees for their work in the quarter. We've really had a good start to the year, and I'm glad we put a conservative plan together that will allow us to deal with the tariffs. Let me also give a special shout out to Matt Welch, who is moving on to his new role as BCA CFO, he has done a great job for us. So congratulations, and thanks, Matt, for all you've done.
Now let me hand it over to Brian to detail the operating results before we take your questions. Brian?