Boeing 737 MAX airplanes on the assembly line at the Renton, Washington, facility during a June 2024 media tour. Credit: Jennifer Buchanan/The Seattle Times via AP
The U.S.-China trade war may require Boeing to redirect aircraft originally destined for China to other customers around the globe, CEO Kelly Ortberg said during a Wednesday earnings call.
Some 50 passenger airliners were scheduled to be delivered to Chinese customers this year, 41 of which had already been built. However, with the up to 145% tariff that China imposed on U.S. goods earlier this month to mirror the Trump administration’s own increased import taxes on Chinese products, those jets — particularly the company’s 737 MAX 8 and other MAX variants —risk growing prohibitively expensive in China. With these orders now effectively frozen, Boeing leadership is exploring other markets where consumer demand was still strong.
As investors and analysts peppered Ortberg with questions, the topic of tariffs continued to dominate the nearly hour-long call.
“I don’t think a day goes by where we aren’t engaged with someone in the administration, including cabinet secretaries and up to POTUS himself,” said Ortberg, noting that “we’ve had the luxury of operating for decades” without tariffs. “So we’re spending a lot of time making sure the administration understands the implications of either short-term or long-term tariffs on not just our company, but the overall aviation industry here in the U.S.”
While President Donald Trump earlier this month announced additional tariffs against dozens of nations, the 145% on Chinese goods is by far the highest. But on Tuesday, he indicated those duties might be sharply reduced. Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump acknowledged that “145% is very high, and it won’t be that high.”
“It’ll come down substantially,” he added. “But it won’t be zero.”
Ortberg did not directly reference Trump’s comments during Wednesday’s call, but noted that “we do hear signs that indicate negotiated settlements.”
“I just don’t know the timing,” he added. “So again, we’re going take the actions we need to make sure if this takes a while, we don’t get into a situation where it impacts our recovery.”
Despite market volatility, Boeing posted better-than-predicted losses for the first three months of 2025, along with a 18% rise in revenue to nearly $19.5 billion compared to the last three months of 2024 — the first such increase the company has reported in more than a year. Executives also touted progress in several areas, including in MAX production.
FAA had capped production of the jets at 38 per month, following the January 2024 door plug blowout aboard a MAX 9 operated by Alaska Airlines. Boeing had yet to hit that target, but Ortberg said the company remains on track to change that this year.
“We are currently producing in the low 30s per month and expect that we’ll get to the 38 per month cap over the next few months,” he said.
Once that is achieved, Boeing intends to seek FAA approval to increase MAX production to 42 per month.
In the space division, Ortberg included the Starliner capsule in a brief list of programs that he described as “now well contained,” but he did not elaborate. NASA said last month that it anticipates conducting another flight test with a Starliner to check out the various modifications made after last year’s crewed test. The capsule carrying astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams experienced helium leaks and thruster degradation while en route to the International Space Station, and NASA decided to bring Starliner back to Earth unoccupied in September; Wilmore and Williams returned home in March in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.
“The thing that we need to solidify and go test is the prop system in the service module,” Steve Stich, NASA’s Commercial Crew program manager, told reporters during a press conference after the astronauts’ return. “We need to make sure we can eliminate the helium leaks, eliminate the service module thruster issues that we had on docking.”
