Boeing Continues Recovery As Commercial Aircraft Deliveries and Revenues Rise, Loss Narrows to Start 2025
When BoeingBA raised over $21B at the end of 2024, it was not out of abundance — but dire need. Faced with mounting losses, a weeks-long strike, and a potential downgrade of its debt to junk status, the aerospace giant desperately needed to turn a corner to mend the problems with its fleet. Some analysts think it finally has.
Is Boeing back? At the end of 2024, Boeing seemed to be heading in the right direction — but not before it laid off 20K employees and posted over $10B in losses. To start 2025, things are looking much better. The aviation firm reported $19.5B in revenue in the first quarter, an 18% rise year-over-year, representing a significant recovery from the 737 MAX incident that kicked off its year from hell last year. It was one of a number of figures that handily bested analysts’ outlooks.
- The aircraft maker delivered 130 aircraft in Q1, a 57% increase — still, the company’s Commercial Airplanes segment saw a $537M loss from operations on $8.1B in revenue.
- At the same time, Boeing’s Defense, Space & Security segment and Global Services remained the only true contributors to earnings — rising 3% YoY.
Vectoring for Takeoff
Boeing isn’t out of the woods yet. Despite reporting a net loss of just $31M (49c adjusted loss, vs. $1.29/sh loss expected), the firm still burned through money, as evidenced by the $2.29B free cash flow burn. Still, the company doubled down on the turnaround in its core business.
- The firm plans to ask regulators to allow it to increase production, giving it a chance to flirt with profitability this year — the FAA currently limits 737 MAX production to 38 jets a month as a result of last year’s incident.
- Boeing also sold parts of its digital aviation solutions business to private equity for $10.55B, a deal meant to emphasize focus and improve its balance sheet.
No China? No problem: Leading up to its earnings, Boeing temporarily starred in the US-China trade war, as Chinese airlines turned away deliveries of aircraft — prompting Boeing to fly them back to the States. But with its commercial aircraft backlog now exceeding 5.6K aircraft, Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg isn’t worried about finding buyers for its jets, saying, “There’s plenty of customers out there looking for the Max aircraft.”BA is up 0.24% YTD.
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