Boeing Spotlights Its Optimism For Aviation-Industry Financials

Boeing is bullish on prospects for support for the aviation industry from the financial sector. “Despite the unprecedented impacts of Covid-19 on the global aerospace industry,” said Tim Myers, president of Boeing Capital Corporation, “there generally continues to be liquidity in the market for our customers, and we expect it to further improve as travel begins to rebound.”

Boeing’s 2021 Current Aircraft Finance Market Outlook reported that, as of the end of 2020, there was still enough liquidity in the “financing environment” to finance aircraft deliveries. Commercial aircraft delivery funding totaled $59 billion, a 40 percent decrease from 2019, according to the outlook report. The leading sources of funding for aircraft deliveries were cash, bank debt, and capital markets. Further, the report says that 100 percent of Boeing deliveries were financed by third parties.

Lessors were involved in “a significant volume” of transactions, according to Boeing, and the leased fleet now represents 46 percent of the total, industry-wide. The report also notes that, while commercial banks were tapped to supply liquidity in the early months of the pandemic, the aviation industry has decreased its use of long-term bank debt, turning to other sources of capital.

In a separate 20-year market forecast, Boeing projected traffic growth at an average of 4 percent per year, and expansion of the global commercial aircraft fleet to 48,400 by 2039, up from the present 25,900.