Breakingviews: Boeing cash patch will be ripped off

Boeing  needs a lot of things, but what it needs most is cash. On Monday the $92 billion aviation giant said it would seek to fix that problem, registering a document with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to raise up to $25 billion by selling debt and stock while also announcing a $10 billion credit agreement. With workers picketing and a strained balance sheet that can’t take much more production downtime, a fundraising will only patch over problems, and the cost will be high.

Boeing burned about $1 billion in the quarter that most recently ended in September. The company, with workers on strike, is trying to conserve cash by firing employees, suspending non-essential investment, and slowing orders from suppliers. Cash burn will probably increase as worker downtime continues. Emergency measures can’t continue forever, and S&P Global estimated earlier the strike would cost over $1 billion a month. Moreover, Boeing announced $5 billion of new pre-tax charges from problems with multiple projects, like a new delay on its 777X jet. The company needs to repay debt in April, and plus it requires cash for working capital.

Raising, say, $12 billion by selling stock, would provide a sufficient cushion for these costs, assuming the strike ends by January. Theoretically, existing investors should see minimal impact. If the company issued the stock at a 15% discount, and shareholders were willing to take up the shares in hope that their investment would increase in value, it would mean a roughly 2% knock to the stock price. On Tuesday morning, shares were roughly flat.

But the new funds are primarily offsetting Boeing’s most immediate problems rather than being used to create value or fix the longer term ones, such as capped production by regulators, aggrieved customers, loss of market share to rival Airbus, and the need to build a new jet. Assume investors believe that Boeing’s value should be the same after the share sale as before, and it would mean a roughly 13% hit to the stock. If debt were issued, it would raise the chances ratings agencies would downgrade the company’s debt to junk, and equity valuation would depress further. The cash injection is just a patch that will soon be ripped off.