What will the Boeing effect be for Leonardo?
According to Leonardo, Boeing will update the 787 production plan this month. The repercussions for the Grottaglie site, where the fuselages of the Boeing 787 are built
Boeing will update the 787 production plan this month. Leonardo's number one Alessandro Profumo said so.
"They will come out with a new plan in the next few days," Profumo told Reuters Saturday at the Dubai Expo: "They're saying they're slightly more optimistic, let's say."
Profumo did not say whether there will be a change in production rates in the new plan that will be released by Boeing. We recall that Boeing's production impacts Leonardo, given that the Grottaglie plant, which belongs to the Aerostructures division, builds two sections of the carbon fiber fuselage for the Boeing 787.
And according to the Fim Cisl, next year will also be affected by a 118-day production gap. Without forgetting that in the meeting of 29 September with the trade unions, Leonardo's Aerostructures division made it known that it will resort to layoffs for employees.
On 30 September, on the Leonardo-Grottaglie dispute, a meeting was also held in the Puglia Region with the president Michele Emiliano. The President undertook to send two urgent summons to Leonardo and the Minister of Labor.
PERFUME: NEW PRODUCTION PLAN IS COMING
"Leonardo expects Boeing to produce at the rate of 10 Dreamliners per month by the end of 2025," the CEO Profumo told Reuters .
Boeing was producing at a rate of 14 per month in 2019, according to the latest available data, Reuters recalled. The US aircraft manufacturer suspended Dreamliner deliveries in late May after the Federal Aviation Administration raised concerns about the proposed inspection method.
THE POSITION OF BOEING
A Boeing representative told Reuters that the aircraft manufacturer had no updates on the 787 production. They did not say if a new production plan would be released soon.
“We constantly analyze the global aviation market, coordinating closely with suppliers and aligning supply with demand”.
THE COMMENT OF THE ANALYSTS
For Bestinver Securities, if the 787 production plan update confirmed this month, “it would be positive news, but partially obvious given Boeing's indications of an improvement in prospects announced a few weeks ago. We also remind you that the Aerostructures division accounted for 6% of Leonardo's turnover in 2020 with Boeing achieving around 50% ”.
As reported by MF , this morning Bestinver confirmed the buy rating and the target price between 7 and 8 euros on the Leonardo stock, the same opinion by Banca Akros (target price at 9.25 euros) which underlines: "the drop in the production rate of 787 had a strong impact on Leonardo's Aerostructures division which should burn 350-400 million euros of liquidity this year, affecting the group's overall free cash flow, which should reach a positive value of 100 million euros. So, any positive news about the Boeing 787 would be good news for Leonardo ”.
THE CONSEQUENCES FOR THE ESTABLISHMENT OF GROTTAGLIE
Finally, Leonardo's Taranto plant awaits news from Boeing.
Of the four factories of Leonardo's Aerostructures division, that of Grottaglie, in the province of Taranto, is most affected because, being a single-contract, it suffers from the significant slowdown that occurred, both due to Covid and for problems that the client Boeing had with a supplier of the production chain, in the construction of the two fuselage sections of the 787.
In the meeting in Rome on September 29th, Leonardo's Aerostructures division "confirmed that the job vacancy that is looming for 2022 will be managed with the use of layoffs, unlike what happened this year in which modalities were used alternatives ”, Antonio Talò reported to Agi .
For the Grottaglie site (which also built 14 pairs of fuselage sections per month), the group led by Alessandro Profumo undertook to search for additional activities complementary to that of 787. Among these, the choice to involve the Grottaglie plant in the Eurodrone program.
"We ask that starting from the next meeting scheduled for October 11 – we read on the sidelines of a note from the Fim Cisl – we begin to go into details and enter into the merits of programs, implementation times and units involved".
In the meantime, the dispute of Leonardo Aerostructures workers also lands on the government table.
"Leonardo Spa intervenes in support of the Aerostructures division on the national territory, acting as One Company". This is what Senator Riccardo Nencini asked in a question to the Minister of Infrastructure Enrico Giovannini regarding the situation of the Leonardo plant in Grottaglie.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/quale-sara-leffetto-boeing-per-leonardo/ on Mon, 04 Oct 2021 14:29:22 +0000.