Bombardier sees Q1 earnings plummet after pandemic shutters factories [UPDATED]

MONTREAL – Bombardier Inc. took a major earnings hit last quarter – with more losses to come – as fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic blocked aircraft deliveries and shut down operations across dozens of plants.

The company, which keeps its books in U.S. dollars, reported a $200 million loss in its first quarter and burned through $1.6 billion in cash as borders and factories closed in March when all non-essential work ground to a halt.

Though plants are gradually ramping up again, the plane-and-train maker expects business activity to hit a low point in the second quarter before mounting a slow comeback in the second half of the year.

“At a certain point, all our facilities were closed,” said chief executive Eric Martel on his first conference call as head of the company.

“We saw a significant impact in Q1, with more to come in Q2, as a large part of our operations have been shut down for the past eight weeks.”

Meanwhile travel restrictions meant that “we got caught with a whole bunch of airplanes that logistically we just couldn’t deliver,” said chief financial officer John Di Bert.

Bombardier expects delivery of business jets to drop between 25 and 35 per cent this year. The second quarter alone could see another $1.6 billion in cash burn, Martel said.

Helping to offset the losses are the expected completion of a pair of divestitures amounting to more than $1 billion.

The US$550-million sale of Bombardier’s CRJ jet program to Mitsubishi is expected by June 1, Martel said. The US$500-million sale of its aerostructures business in Belfast and Morocco to Spirit Aerosystems – initially anticipated in the first half of 2020 – should close “in the coming months.”

Martel said he does not foresee any pandemic-related delays to the US$8.2-billion sale of its rail division to French train giant Alstom SA, expected to close in the first half of 2021.

Bombardier recently negotiated an additional US$386-million “equity injection” from the Caisse de depot et placement, handing the Caisse a larger stake in Bombardier’s train division and leaving the company with $2.9 billion in financial liquidity – including $2.1 billion in cash – as of March 31.

The 78-year-old company continues to grapple with share-price lows, credit downgrades and a debt of more than US$9 billion.

It has become a penny stock with junk-status credit ratings as it slims down to a single revenue stream – private planes – just as the economy plunges into a downturn.

“We have a very, very solid backlog in the (Global) 7500 and we don’t see that moving a lot,” Martel said. The market for the smaller Learjet and Challenger airplanes, however, looks “a little bit more volatile,” he said.

Bombardier shuttered operations and sent 12,400 employees – 70 per cent of its Canadian workforce – on unpaid leave on March 24 as non-essential services ground to a halt across the country. About 11,000 furloughed staff – 9,000 of them in Quebec – will return to work over the next few weeks, benefiting from the federal wage subsidy that funds 75 per cent of an employee’s pay up to a maximum of $847.

For the first quarter, Bombardier lost 11 cents per diluted share compared with a profit of $239 million or eight cents per share a year ago.

Revenue totalled $3.69 billion in the three-month period ended March 31, up from nearly $3.52 billion in the first quarter of 2019.

On an adjusted basis, Bombardier says it lost $169 million or 10 cents per share in the first quarter compared with an adjusted loss of $122 million or seven cents per share a year earlier.

Analysts on average had expected an adjusted loss of seven cents per share for the quarter, according to financial markets data firm Refinitiv.

News from © The Canadian Press Enterprises 2020