Boeing’s strike is still on. Its strained balance sheet makes matters worse.
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Boeing’s new chief executive Kelly Ortberg has many active fronts in his battle to “reset" the company, including addressing labor strikes, re-establishing a culture of accountability, fixing ongoing problems at the defense division and figuring out how to build innovative plane models again. Now he also has to seriously worry about the company’s deteriorating balance sheet.
On Wednesday, the plane maker said that it had lost $6.2 billion and experienced a free cash flow of negative $2 billion during the third quarter, as a result of a strike that started in September. But the worse news came later in the day, when its largest machinist union rejected a deal to increase wages by 64% over the next four years. Shares in Boeing, which closed down 1.8% Wednesday, kept falling during Thursday’s premarket trading.
They have lost 54% in five years. Remarkably, Wall Street is starting to turn against the debt too. Earlier this month, S&P Global Ratings placed the plane maker on a watchlist for potentially being downgraded to a “speculative" grade.
It would be the largest-ever company to suffer this fate. The yield on its bonds has gone from trading less than one percentage-point above Treasury yields in the summer to almost 1.4 percentage points above now, edging closer to the average spread of the highest-rated “junk" bonds. Until recently, Boeing seemed insulated from any default risk by the fact that its only true rival is Europe’s Airbus, which can’t service all of the world’s airlines alone.
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