Boeing Will Sell Its Digital Businesses for $10 Billion
Boeing on Tuesday announced that it would sell a handful of navigation, flight planning and other businesses for more than $10.5 billion as the company works to refocus on manufacturing planes and other aircraft.
The company, which also wants to reduce its large debt, said it would sell four businesses from a digital unit to Thoma Bravo, a private equity firm specializing in software. Those include Jeppesen, which provides navigational charts and information to pilots, and ForeFlight, an app that helps plan flights and monitor weather.
'This transaction is an important component of our strategy to focus on core businesses, supplement the balance sheet and prioritize the investment grade credit rating,' Kelly Ortberg, Boeing's chief executive, said in a statement.
The company said that it expected to close the all-cash deal by the end of the year. The digital unit that houses those businesses employs about 3,900 people, though some of the unit will remain at Boeing. The company employed about 172,000 people as of the start of the year.
Mr. Ortberg, who joined the company last summer, made streamlining Boeing's operations a strategic goal as he tries to address concerns about the quality of the company's planes that were raised after a panel blew off a 737 Max plane during a January 2024 flight near Portland, Ore.
No one was seriously injured in that incident, but it renewed worries about Boeing's planes several years after two fatal crashes of the 737 Max in 2018 and 2019. Safety and quality issues have stymied Boeing's commercial plane production in recent years. Then last fall, production of the 737 Max, Boeing's most popular commercial plane, came to a near standstill during a two-month worker strike.
In January, Mr. Ortberg said that the company had resumed production of the Max, and was making more than 20 of those planes per month as well as five of the larger 787 Dreamliners.
That is well below the goal the company had set before last year's panel incident of delivering 50 of its 737s and 10 of its 787s per month. Boeing has about 5,500 outstanding commercial plane orders, valued at hundreds of billions of dollars.
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