Gregory Smith
Analyst · Barclays
Great. Thanks, Dave, and good morning, everyone. Let's please turn to Slide 5. As Dave mentioned, this moment is among the most difficult in our company's 100-plus year history. Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have taken prudent and decisive action in attempt to get ahead of this to preserve cash so that we can navigate this crisis and also reshape our business so that we can merge as a sharper, more resilient and more competitive company. We are being and will continue to be proactive and look around corners to assess risk factors and take appropriate action. We've been focused on derisking our business and a disciplined cash management for some time, and COVID-19 has accelerated these efforts further. I'll go through a quick time line of our early actions we've taken in 2020 and then provide you with an update of our transformation efforts. Starting back in the middle of March, as the potential risk of the virus escalated, we took a proactive step to fully draw down on our $13.8 billion delayed draw term loan. Given the uncertainty of the markets at that time, we understood that this was a prudent step to bring that cash on our balance sheet. Almost immediately thereafter, we suspended our dividend and terminated our share repurchase authorization. Even then, at the early stage, it was clear to us that liquidity would be critical through this pandemic. These early decisive actions were critical and important. Next, in early April, we rolled out our first voluntary layoff program. We recognized the need to reduce our staffing levels, given the sharp reduction in commercial aircraft demand. And we took action to limit the impact on our teams as much as possible through voluntary opportunities first. This was followed by involuntary layoff programs. By the first quarter earnings, we announced additional actions, including reducing our commercial production rates, limiting discretionary spending and lower overall staffing levels by about 10%. While difficult, all these steps were critical in the early days of this global crisis. Shortly thereafter, we went to the bond market and raised $25 billion, which has proven to be instrumental to helping us navigate this crisis. The strong investor response reflected the confidence the overall market has in our future as well as the shift -- swift action that the U.S. government took to support the credit markets. Throughout the spring and summer, we stayed very closely engaged with our customers and suppliers, working to understand the impacts of the pandemic so that we could recalibrate our industry while maintaining as much stability as possible. And by the second quarter earnings, with a deeper understanding of the prolonged impact, we further reduced our commercial production rates and announced that we would further reduce our staffing levels. As you'll also recall at that point, we formally rolled out our business transformation efforts to assess every aspect of our business across 5 key pillars of infrastructure, overhead and organization, portfolio and investments, supply chain health and operational excellence. I'll share more updates on these shortly. In August, we moved forward with our second voluntary layoff program, which was much broader than our initial program and included our executives, which are then followed by another involuntary layoff program. We managed this process very closely to ensure continuity where necessary, and to maintain confidence in our ability to deliver on our commitments to our customers. Next, we rolled out a series of organizational realignments to streamline and simplify how we operate. Also, through our 787 study, it became evident that the consolidation to a single production location in South Carolina will make us more efficient and lower production and better positioned for the future. As a result, earlier this month, we made the decision to consolidate the 787 production in South Carolina by mid-'21. We are approaching these business transformation efforts with rigor and thoughtful evaluation at each step. We have made notable progress across all 5 pillars of our business transformation efforts. We will utilize this time when we are at the lower production rate environment to reinvent and to improve our business processes. First, regarding our infrastructure pillar. We're assessing our overall facility and site footprint in light of the reduced demand. The consolidation of the 787 production is an example of this. At the same time, we're also taking into account new flexible and virtual work opportunities. If you asked us 8 to 9 months ago if we thought a large portion of our workforce could work virtually while still being productive, you might have heard skepticism. But these last several months have shown us that we can be more flexible. Building on the lessons of our experiences, we're studying an enterprise footprint optimization effort, utilizing flexible and virtual workplace planning. We're starting with a few pilot programs over the coming months, which will help determine our best path forward. At the same time, we're also looking to make more efficient use of our square footage, and in some cases, reduce the overall footprint. Through staffing reductions and our flexible workplace program, we anticipate a reduction of approximately 30% in office space needs compared to our current capacity. We're reviewing every piece of real estate, every building, every lease, every warehouse, every site to look at how we can be more efficient, and we'll share our decisions as we make them. Turning to our overhead and organizational pillar. This is where we've been looking critically at our cost structure, at how Boeing operates and how we're organized, benchmarked to top-quartile standards so we can simplify, reduce layers, reduce bureaucracy, while ensuring we strengthen connections vital to safety, quality and performance. As an example, we're studying how we organize our production and development programs better by reducing the layers between program leadership and the factory floor, increasing our management spans and control, and improving direct and indirect ratios. These actions are aimed at enhancing communication, empowering our teams and creating lasting efficiencies in how we do our work. Moving to our portfolio and investment pillar. We're shaping our portfolio and aligning our investments to focus on the core business, market opportunities and sustainability efforts. In addition to the impact in demand near term -- on near term, COVID-19 will also impact the timing of new market opportunities. Prior to the pandemic, we were investing for -- in growth markets and growing business. But as the market conditions have changed, have -- we have made swift decisions to adapt. You've seen us start to reprioritize our investments, and we will continue to do so and make prudent decisions going forward. We originally plan to invest over $6 billion this year. Through prioritization, we have pared back these investments by approximately $2 billion. That said, we have and we will continue to invest in all lines of our business. In fact, we've invested more than $60 billion over the last 10 years in key strategic areas of our business. As we take action in this pillar, we will not lose sight of our future and the exciting technologies that will reshape the future of air travel. Our guiding principle here is that every decision we make must help us navigate through this difficult period while also not diminishing our future competitiveness. Moving to supply chain pillars, Dave mentioned our suppliers are experiencing the same pressure that we are. Many of them are small businesses without our portfolio of diversity and scale. Our teams are actively talking to our suppliers every day. We have to work together as an industry to get through this difficult time so that we can come out of this healthy on the other side. We have made enhancements of our supply chain risk assessments and are closely monitoring each supplier, mitigating issues, exploring financing solutions and getting creative and supporting them in the best way we can. The reality is that our industry as a whole will simply build less over the coming years. And we have to help our industry partners recalibrate to that lower demand in the near term, while maintaining stability as much as possible and positioning to return to growth in the medium to long term. We're also transforming our transportation, warehouse and logistics approach to streamline our warehousing network, set enterprise standards and improve efficiencies. We're targeting a greater than 20% improvement to our internal material management costs while driving down our freight transportation spend and optimizing our warehousing operations. And we're also reducing our indirect and overhead spending on things like capital equipment, facility support and enterprise services. We have an opportunity to significantly reduce our overall indirect spending, and we will be closely managing this process to ensure we continue to drive the highest levels of safety and quality. Lastly, we're working diligently to accelerate operational excellence across the enterprise so that we can improve performance, enhance quality, safety, reduce rework and associated costs. The enterprise operations team successfully launched the formation of 4 company-wide process councils around supply chain, program management, quality and manufacturing. These councils are already driving integration and accelerating efforts to enhance program performance. We have simplified our structure to allow the process councils to lead on driving accountability and decision-making closer to the work that's being performed. When and where we identify issues at a program level, we're implementing thorough corrections, transparency, sharing information with our customers and strengthening processes across the enterprise to enhance first-time quality in every program. These are just a few underway across the business. And over the coming weeks, months and years, we'll keep you up-to-date on the transformation journey. Our focus here is clear. We're taking comprehensive action to preserve liquidity, navigate the pandemic, adapt to our new markets, improve performance and position our company for the future. As we take these actions, we're ensuring that every step only furthers our drive key efforts in safety, quality and delivering on our commitments. These efforts are meant to create meaningful and lasting change to how we operate and our cost structure. The financial objectives we've established are measured in billions of dollars, and we expect them to be executed over a multiyear period. In the current environment, we must take these actions to adapt to lower demand. What we're trying to achieve here are sustainable, structural, lasting improvements in our performance that lay the foundation for future margin expansion and cash flow generation as the market recovers. So with that, let's turn to Slide 6 for our third quarter results. Our financial results continue to be significantly impacted by COVID-19 and the 737 MAX grounding. Third quarter revenue of $14.1 billion reflects lower Commercial Airplane deliveries and commercial services volume, primarily, again, due to COVID-19. Earnings in the quarter were also impacted by charges for BCA abnormal costs related to the 737 program and severance costs for the additional approximate 7,000 employees leaving the company through the end of '21. These impacts were partially offset by an income tax benefit related to the NOL carryback provision in the CARES Act as well as the impact of pretax losses. Let's now move to Commercial Airplanes on Slide 7. Revenue was $3.6 billion, reflecting lower Commercial Airplane deliveries due to the significant impacts of the pandemic, as well as 787 quality issues and associated rework. BCA third quarter operating margins declined primarily due to lower delivery volume and a $590 million of abnormal costs related to the 737 program. Similar to prior period, in preparation for our third quarter financial statements, we have made certain assumptions on production rates across all programs as well as the 737 MAX delivery profile. As Dave mentioned, we've assumed that the timing of the regulatory approvals will enable 737 deliveries to resume during the fourth quarter of 2020. We currently have approximately 450 737 MAX aircraft built and stored in inventory. We expect to have to remarket some of these aircraft and potentially reconfigure them, which will extend the delivery time frame. We now expect delivery of about half of the aircraft currently in storage by the end of next year and the majority of the remaining in the following year. Delivery from storage will continue to be our priority after assisting our customers with their return to service. We expect the 737 MAX delivery timing, along with the production rate ramp-up profile to continue to be dynamic as they will ultimately be dictated by the pace of the commercial market recovery, which has been slow and remains uncertain. There is no material change in the estimate for the total abnormal cost of $5 billion, and we expect these costs will be expenses incurred over this year and next year. During the third quarter, we expensed $590 million of abnormal production costs, which brought the cumulative abnormal cost expense to date to $2.1 billion. Our assessment of the liability for the estimated potential concessions and other considerations to customers for disruptions related to the 737 MAX grounding and associated delivery delays did not change significantly in the third quarter. Cumulatively, we've accrued a $9.1 billion liability for the estimated potential concessions and other considerations. To date, we've made $3.1 billion of payments to customers in cash and other forms of compensation, including $500 million we paid this quarter. We have settlement agreements covering approximately $2.6 billion of the remaining liability balance of $6 billion. We continue to address the impact individually customer by customer, including assessing the efforts that the MAX disruption is having on their operations in light of the COVID impact. We also continue to expect any concessions or other considerations to be provided over a number of years with the cash impact to be more front-end loaded in the first few years. Any changes to these assumptions could require us to recognize additional financial impacts. Commercial Airplanes backlog includes more than 4,300 aircraft valued at $313 billion. The decline in backlog in the third quarter reflected the aircraft order cancellations and the removal of aircraft orders from our backlog due to ASC 606 accounting standards. As you saw in the second and third quarter, our production has outpaced our delivery rate. And we expect this to continue in the near term, resulting in higher finished goods inventory. We have a large number of undelivered 787 aircraft in inventory, and we are working with our customers to facilitate their deliveries. The burn down of 787 inventory over the next few months will largely be influenced by the pace of delivery activities, which has been and expected to remain relatively slow due to the additional time we're taking to inspect and ensure each of our 787s are delivered to our highest quality standards. We're also closely watching the international passenger traffic recovery, which so far has been weak and is more challenging than what we anticipated last quarter. The trend going forward is heavily dependent on the virus, testing, coordinated policies to alleviate travel restrictions and timing and availability of a vaccine. We will continue to assess the downside risk of our production rates going forward. Let's now move to Defense, Space & Security on Slide 8. Third quarter revenue decreased slightly to $6.8 billion, reflecting derivative aircraft award timing, partially offset by higher fighter volume. Third quarter operating margin decreased to 9.2%, primarily reflecting less favorable performance, including a $67 million KC-46A tanker charge due to continued COVID-19 disruptions and productivity inefficiencies. During the quarter, BDS won key contract awards worth $5 billion, including a contract extension for the International Space Station for NASA and a contract for 9 additional Chinook Block II helicopters for the United States Army Special Ops. Our backlog now stands at $62 billion, with 30% from outside of the United States. Let's now turn to Boeing Global Services results on Slide 9. In the third quarter, Global Services revenue declined to $3.7 billion, driven by lower commercial services volume due to COVID-19. This was partially offset by higher government service volume. Operating margin in the quarter reflected lower commercial services volume and an additional 7 truck costs. During the quarter, BGS won key contracts worth approximately $3 billion, which brings its backlog now to $17 billion. Although we saw a slight uptick in service demand in the third quarter, we predict the recovery would take multiple years, and we continue to take action to position our services business for the future. This includes not only employment actions and inventory rightsizing, but also making sure we have the right product, right service solutions to help our customers and industry navigate the downturn and scale their operations as near-term demand trends upward. Let's now turn to cash flow on Slide 10. The disruption caused by COVID-19 on our airlines and the global economy continues to put significant pressure on our cash receipts. Operating cash flow for the third quarter was negative $4.8 billion driven by commercial -- lower Commercial Airplane delivery volume, advanced payment timing and commercial services volume. We achieved solid cash generation from our government programs and continue to expect future cash flow to be roughly in line with earnings from our government side of the business. The continued slow and uneven commercial market recovery is significantly impacting our cash flow and increasing pressure in the near term. We currently expect 2021 cash flow to be much improved from 2020, driven mainly by deliveries and inventory burn down associated with 737 and 787 programs. And we anticipate the cash profile to continue to improve further from '21 to 2022. While we're still aiming to turn cash positive in late '21, the recovery and the continued elevated virus cases make the path much more challenging. Based on what we know today, it's looking more likely that we will be cash flow-positive in the 2022 time frame. Our cash flow trajectory will clearly be dependent on the pace of commercial market recovery and how customer deliveries progress moving forward. Progress on testing protocols, government travel restrictions and vaccine will be the pacing items. And we will continue to diligently work opportunities and monitor risk factors, given the dynamic nature of this current environment. Let's move now to Slide 11, and we'll discuss our liquidity position. We continue to proactively manage our cash and assess our liquidity daily through this challenging time. We ended the third quarter with strong liquidity, including $27.1 billion of cash and marketable securities on our balance sheet and access to our $9.5 billion bank credit facility, which remains undrawn as well as continuing to assess the capital markets. Our debt balance at the end of the quarter was $61 billion. And through the end of the year, we have just under $4 billion of debt maturing. To further bolster our liquidity as we work through the impacts of this pandemic, we may seek to refinance that maturing debt in the fourth quarter this year. In addition, we've decided to use Boeing's stock rather than cash to fund our company contribution to employees' 401(k) plans for the foreseeable future. This will preserve approximately $1 billion of cash gradually over the next 12 months. We also plan to make a discretionary contribution to our defined benefit pension plan in the fourth quarter, totaling $3 billion, which will also be funded by Boeing's stock. This move will further strengthen the funded status of our retirement plans to benefit our employees and retirees while improving our balance sheet position and minimizing future cash outflows. As we mentioned previously, we expect our use of cash due to COVID-19 to continue for the remainder of this year and into '21. Therefore, proactively managing our liquidity and balance sheet leverage will continue to be top priorities as we navigate this challenging environment. Once cash flow generation returns to more normal levels, reducing our debt levels will be our key focus area. These actions reflect our continued derisking strategy and as part of our balanced approach to ensuring we proactively meet future obligations. We worked hard in the past to maintain disciplined cash management while seeking opportunities to strengthen our balance sheet, and we will continue these efforts. Let's just now turn to the last slide to summarize. We covered a lot today, but I want to provide you further clarity on our approach and our actions in addressing the profound impact the pandemic has had on our company and our industry. Through this tough time, we have focused on the health and safety of our employees and communities while working closely with our customers and suppliers to navigate this global pandemic and rebuild stronger on the other side. We also remain focused on achieving our priorities in transforming our business to adapt to this new market reality. As we've outlined today, we took decisive early actions to adapt, and we will continue to do so going forward. We've got the right team in place. They are focused. And we will continue to transform our business across the 5 pillars. As challenging as this situation has been and currently is, we continue to be confident in our long-term market outlook. The mission today is clear: Stay laser-focused on the market dynamics, take proactive action across all aspects of our business with all eyes on liquidity, and emerge stronger and more resilient. We're committed to executing on actions that position our company and our industry for the future. So with that, I'll turn it over to Dave for some closing comments.