CFO Brian West says "there's changes that need to happen" — and that they will be expensive
It’s another setback for Boeing $BA on the long, long road to a commercial comeback made longer by the continued fallout from the Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9 door plug blowout in January. The giant cash hoard the company had built up has sprung a big leak.
“There’s changes that need to happen,” CFO Brian West said at a recent conference put on by Bank of America $BAC. “There’s no doubt about it.” Those changes will be expensive.
Boeing still hasn’t provided guidance on how bad business will get between the investigations and lawsuits and production delays the company is facing. But West told the crowd at the event that Boeing has one number in mind: $4.5 billion. That’s how much cash the company is expecting to see go out the door this quarter alone. Its cash pile shrank by $1.9 billion in only last year to end up at $12.7 billion.
“First of all, there’s a combination of lower deliveries, lower volume at BCA and negative mix from inventory airplanes,” West said. “That’s a big piece of the delta. And then there are some working capital pressures, both inventory as well as some receipt timing. That is what’s going to happen in the quarter, and we also believe that some of that will not be made up for, for the full year.”
That’s corporate finance speak for: We can’t build commercial airline planes as quickly even though our customers really, really want us to, and we have to eat some of the resulting costs on both the loss of revenue and from financing the slower building of those planes. A lot of that cash will be gone for good.
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