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Things are slowly returning to normal for Boeing and the commercial aerospace industry.
Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images
Things are getting better for
Boeing
—finally.
On Tuesday,
Boeing
(ticker: BA) reported that it had delivered 69 planes in December and 152 planes in the 2022 fourth quarter overall. That’s the highest quarterly delivery figure since the fourth quarter of 2018, when Boeing delivered 238 planes.
Deliveries dropped off in 2019 after the 737 MAX was grounded worldwide that March. That plane didn’t fly commercially again until late 2020. After the MAX’s issues came Covid-19, which hurt demand for air travel and airline profits. Deliveries bottomed out at 20 planes in the second quarter of 2020.
For the full year, Boeing delivered 480 jets in 2022, up from 340 delivered in 2021. Boeing delivered 806 jets in 2018, the year before any impact from the 737 MAX’s grounding or the Covid-19 pandemic.
Customers ordered 935 jets in 2022, up from 909 in 2021. Customers ordered 1,090 jets in 2018. Orders bottomed out in 2020, with 184 jet orders.
Shares are up about $2 since the delivery numbers were released Tuesday, but are still slightly down for the day. The
S&P 500
and
Dow Jones Industrial Average
are both up about 0.1%.
The figures are solid, but things have been going better for Boeing and its shares lately in general. Shares are up about 58% over the past three months, while the S&P 500 is up about 8% over the same span.
Boeing stock’s rapid ascent in recent months also resulted in a Tuesday downgrade from Morgan Stanley analyst Kristine Liwag. She cut her target to Hold from Buy, but raised her price target to $220 a share from $213.
With the cut, now about 73% of analysts covering Boeing stock rate shares Buy. The average Buy-rating ratio for stocks in the S&P 500 is about 58%.
Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com
