Boeing Forecasts Strong Aircraft Demand, Financing Options for 2016

Boeing Co. (NYSE: BA) on Friday morning released its 2016 aircraft finance market outlook. The headline number is $127 billion, the forecast amount for new commercial deliveries in 2016, up from $124 billion in 2015. The company’s Boeing Capital Corporation also forecasts deliveries totaling $130 billion in 2017, $142 billion in 2018 and $161 billion in 2019. How all these airplanes will be paid for is the subject of Friday’s release.

Boeing expects bank debt and capital markets to fund about 63% of all 2016 deliveries, with cash accounting for another 24% of funding and export credit to cover another 11%. Aircraft leasing companies are expected to use bank debt and capital market financing to acquire about 40% of all deliveries again next year. Here’s Boeing overview of the market:

Overall, the aircraft finance outlook for 2016 is a positive one. We expect the industry to continue developing new markets and structures, enabling even broader financier and investor participation in aviation and resulting in greater efficiency for airlines and lessors. In particular, we forecast increasing momentum behind lessor portfolio sell-down into the capital markets and the development of regional private placement markets.

Export credit is forecast to be slightly less important to deliveries than it was in 2015, 11% compared with 13% last year. The reauthorization in December of the U.S. Export-Import Bank was good news for Boeing although the company continues to maintain that export credit will remain at historically low levels.
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Boeing delivered a record 762 new commercial aircraft in 2015 and closed the year with net new orders for 768 planes, barely ahead of its target book-to-bill ratio of one. The company reports fourth-quarter and full-year 2015 results next Wednesday, and consensus estimates call for quarterly earnings per share (EPS) of $2.13 on revenues of $23.59 billion. For the full year analysts are looking for EPS of $8.22 on revenues of $96.08 billion.

Boeing’s shares traded up about 0.7% in Friday’s premarket, at $124.38 in a 52-week range of $115.14 to $158.83.