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Boeing Bosses Are Looking For Ways To Reduce 787 Costs

Ashley Gross
/
KPLU
Boeing's 787 production line in Everett

Boeing shares are up 8 percent this year and revenue has been climbing but the company still faces some big challenges. One of them is how to build 787s more cheaply.

Chief Financial Officer Greg Smith told investors at a conference in New York the company is working hard on that.

Under accounting rules, Boeing is allowed to defer some production costs into the future because early planes are a lot more expensive to build. That money’s already been spent but they don’t have to account for it until later.

Those deferred costs for the 787 program now total more than $27 billion. Company executives have said that number will keep growing until next year when Boeing starts building more 787s per month.

Smith said the company’s evaluating more than one thousand ideas for how to bring costs down.

“The teams are able to now look ahead and have enough experience under the belt to know hey, there’s a better way of doing this,” he said.

The 787 is built in Everett and in South Carolina at a rate of ten a month right now. Smith says next year that rate will climb to 12 a month.

That’s just one of the production rate increases Boeing says it has planned for coming years as it works through its backlog of orders totaling almost 5,700 planes.

In July 2017, Ashley Gross became KNKX's youth and education reporter after years of covering the business and labor beat. She joined the station in May 2012 and previously worked five years at WBEZ in Chicago, where she reported on business and the economy. Her work telling the human side of the mortgage crisis garnered awards from the Illinois Associated Press and the Chicago Headline Club. She's also reported for the Alaska Public Radio Network in Anchorage and for Bloomberg News in San Francisco.