Boeing Co., in its 100th year in business, will consider moving key parts of its operation to other countries if Congress does not vote to revive the Export-Import Bank, which expired last month, Boeing Chairman James McNerney said Wednesday.
“We love making and designing airplanes in the United States, but we are now forced to think about doing it differently,” McNerney said in a talk at the Economic Club of Washington, DC.
The federal Export-Import bank expired June 30 when Congress failed to renew its charter. However, the Senate voted 64-29 Monday to add an amendment to a highway bill that is being considered and that would revive the bank.
“I’m more worried about it today than I ever have (been),” McNerney said. “It has been a wildly successful program because what it does is it isolates the quality of the technology being sold and gets off the table all the shenanigans that people could do financially.
“But all the politics associated with the extremists of both parties, particularly the Republican Party, is preventing this thing from getting to a vote,” he said.
According to McNerney, Boeing is the biggest beneficiary of the Export-Import Bank in total dollars lent to other countries to buy U.S. goods, but there are more actual deals for smaller and medium-size companies than big companies. For example, 70% of the value added to Boeing’s airplanes comes from small companies manufacturing parts for Boeing, he said.
“Every time a Triple Seven lands in Beijing, it takes seven or eight thousand small businesses to Beijing,” McNerney said, “None of those would have a chance to export without us.”
There are only two major commercial aircraft builders in the world because of “the scale of the infrastructure we needed to design and build these things,” according to McNerney.
“But I think Airbus and us are facing competition and if I had to bet, it would be China,” he said. “It will be at least a three-man game.”
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