Spirit AeroSystems today posted a "disappointing" second quarter drop-off for both revenues and profit caused partly by a major charge on problems developing the wing for the Gulfstream G250 business jet.
Spirit Aero's quarterly income declined to an $8 million loss compared to an $86 million profit during the same period a year ago. Quarterly revenues also dropped slightly to $1.06 billion from $1.062, the company says.
While sales for the fuselage systems segment increased 10% to $541 million, revenue in wing systems and propulsions segments was down by 11% and 6%, respectively.
"This is obviously a disappointing quarter for us financially," said President and CEO Jeff Turner. The quarter included a $93 million charge caused by a forward-loss on the G250 wing program. The programme has suffered "significant overruns in expected development costs", and Spirit Aero in response has moved to adopt "aggressive engineering change control", the company says.
Updating the G200 Galaxy jet, the G250 is scheduled to enter service in 2011 and the first aircraft is scheduled to fly by end-year. The all-new wing design is credited for most of the promised performance improvements, including the ability to carry a 1,815kg (4,000lb) payload for nearly 4,630km (2,500nm), and almost 450kg for nearly 6,300km.
Spirit Aero also blamed the quarter's sluggish performance on the internal implementation of a new enterprise resource planning system that reduced operating efficiency.
The company lowered revenue guidance for the full year slightly to between $4.2 billion and $4.3 billion, which assumes Boeing delivers 480-485 aircraft, Airbus delivers 483 aircraft, 787 deliveries ramp-up as expected and stable foreign exchange rates.
Source: Air Transport Intelligence news
