Military

The Other Airshow Winner: Embraer Over Boeing

When it comes time for the annual Farnborough International Airshow, investors and industry watchers always focus on the multibillion-dollar orders secured by giant rivals Boeing Co. (NYSE: BA) and Airbus. They both scored large future orders well into the billions of dollars to add to their backlogs. Brazilian jet-maker Embraer S.A. (NYSE: ERJ) is almost hardly ever reviewed for its orders, but the company turned out to be a stealth winner of the Farnborough Air Show. In fact, it has taken down new orders worth north of $7 billion — not bad considering its effective $6.2 billion in total revenues in 2013.

If you tally up the wins from China, Japan, Brazil and others at the Farnborough Air Show in their entirety, the tally would be a total of $7.1 billion on a firm basis. By some counts this would be close to $12 billion if all the options get exercised from more than 210 total orders. Embraer’s market cap is $7 billion.

As far as a comparison to Boeing, consider that Boeing’s revenue in 2013 was more than $86 billion. Boeing said it had some $40 billion in orders and commitments from the airshow, covering some 783 planes.

Embraer had already ended its second quarter with $18.1 billion in firm backlog. Embraer’s gain of 0.4% in New York trading of its ADSs this past week may not seem that impressive on first look, but Boeing shares were down by almost 0.4% last week.

We would point out that Embraer shares were as high as $40 earlier in the week before the market turmoil, and before news was out that an airline jet had been blown out of the sky on the geopolitical risk game.

ALSO READ: Boeing, Airbus Add 700 Jets to Backlog

Merrill Lynch also keyed in on the gains made. The firm said that the backlog would stand at $25 billion, the highest backlog since 2002. Merrill Lynch also talked up orders from Azerbaijan Airlines, Azul, Fuji Dream Airlines, Trans States, HNA Group (Tianjin Airlines) and ICBC Leasing.

The Merrill Lynch report kept a Buy rating on the Embraer ADSs with a whopping $48 price target. The firm noted:

Including the firm orders announced this week, we see Embraer trading at 0.28 times enterprise value to backlog ratio versus the historical average of 0.36 since 2001. Despite the 19% year-to-date performance, we still see valuation as attractive and still believe more orders could come throughout the second half of the year in all three segments (commercial aviation, execution aviation and defense). The next short term catalyst is the second quarter earnings, which we expect to be solid, bringing margin improvement quarter-over-quarter. Embraer has outperformed all the major aerospace indexes over the past 90 days and we think good earnings momentum and the growing backlog will support the stock.

Embraer closed at $38.43 on Friday. Its consensus analyst price target looks to be $39.16, and the 52-week high is $40.37. Still, Merrill Lynch is the most bullish of all analysts, with a whopping $48 price target.

ALSO READ: 10 Countries Spending the Most on the Military

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