So, what exactly do you do when the government starts breathing down your company’s collective neck, chunks of the airplanes you manufacture occasionally come off in flight, and your spacecraft’s launch schedule now looks more like a calendar than anything else? Well, if you’re Dave Calhoun, CEO of Boeing (NYSE:BA), you get political and wax philosophical about the nature of change. Indeed, while at an event in Berlin, he announced that Boeing is a “different company” now and that it’s “looking to put the crisis behind them.”
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For the most part, investors were willing to go along with this plan, sending shares up fractionally in Tuesday afternoon’s trading.
But there are still quite a few unanswered questions about how Boeing is different and what it plans to do to make itself a “different company.” We’ve heard some of these measures, and they’re sound enough, like improved training and better tools. But with the top brass largely unchanged, it’s easy to wonder just how changed Boeing actually is.
Turning Political
After being asked about the upcoming U.S. presidential election, Calhoun then turned his—and, by extension, Boeing’s—attention to the upcoming election. Calhoun noted that “isolationism” had the potential to “ruin economies.”
While Calhoun wasn’t particularly concerned about Boeing being hurt by isolationism—he described Boeing as a company in a field with “major needs” and “few choices”—he was concerned about the overall economic impact, which would eventually filter down to Boeing. After all, fewer people travel in a hurting economy, and with fewer travelers, that means a lot less demand for aircraft.
Is Boeing Stock a Buy or Sell?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Moderate Buy consensus rating on BA stock based on 17 Buys, seven Holds, and two Sells assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After an 11.39% loss in its share price over the past year, the average BA price target of $215.87 per share implies 16.11% upside potential.
