As Boeing Co prepares to shutter much of a huge factory near Seattle that builds the grounded 737 MAX jet, the economic hit is reverberating across the US in places such as Wichita, Kansas; Stamford, Connecticut; and Cincinnati, Ohio.
Those cities are home to some of 900 companies worldwide that supply parts for the troubled plane, which analysts say is the largest manufactured product exported from the US.
Boeing does not plan to lay off any of the 12,000 workers at its factory in Renton, Washington.
Photo: Reuters
However, smaller parts companies, such as Wichita-based Spirit AeroSystems Holdings Inc, might not have that luxury. They could be forced to cut employees and some might even get pushed out of business.
With 13,500 workers, Spirit is the largest employer in Kansas’ biggest city. It gets half of its revenue from making fuselages for the 737.
Even though MAX production had slowed earlier in the year, Spirit and other suppliers continued to crank out parts, putting many of them in storage. As of Friday last week, Spirit had 90 fuselages on a ramp adjacent to nearby McConnell Air Force Base.
CFM International SA, a joint venture between General Electric Co and France’s Safran SA, which makes the MAX engines, also faces uncertainty.
The Cincinnati-based firm on Tuesday said that it is working with customers and other suppliers “to mitigate the impact of the temporary shutdown of the 737 MAX production.”
The company, which has more than 80 manufacturing sites worldwide with about 50,000 workers, said it can move people and manufacturing across multiple engine programs. That might hold off any layoffs.
CFM produces other engines for commercial and military aircraft.
Stamford-based Hexcel Corp, which makes composite materials used on the 737 MAX frame and engines was already reporting lower sales after Boeing slowed the rate of MAX production.
On Tuesday, the company tried to sound hopeful, saying it was confident in the airplane’s long-term success and looked forward “to its return to flight and gradual ramp-up in production during 2020.”
The 737 MAX is such a big product that by itself, the production hiatus would shrink US GDP by about 0.5 percent in the first quarter of next year, JP Morgan Chase & Co economist Michael Feroli said.
That could cut the US economy’s growth rate by about a quarter to 1.5 percent.
Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist for RSM, a tax advisory and consulting firm, predicted layoffs by suppliers and wrote in a note that some might have trouble staying in business.
“It cannot be overstated just how important the domestic and global supply chains associated with Boeing are to the small and medium-sized firms,” Brusuelas wrote.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
RSS