WSJ What’s News - What’s News in Earnings: Defense Contractors Thrive in Uncertain World

Episode Date: April 29, 2025

Bonus Episode for April 29. Every U.S. manufacturer faces increased costs because of import tariffs and other countries’ countermeasures, but those making weapons have reason to be both worried and hopeful. WSJ Investing columnist Spencer Jakab discusses with WSJ reporter Sharon Terlep what Northrop Grumman, RTX, General Dynamics, Boeing and other defense companies have reported for their first quarter earnings and what that means for the sector and the broader U.S. economy.  Sign up for the WSJ's free Markets A.M. newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Conditions apply to all benefits. Visit pcfinancial.ca for details. Hey listeners, it's April 29th. I'm Spencer Jacob for The Wall Street Journal, and this is What's News and Earnings, our look at the broad themes that stood out in the latest earnings season. We're four months into 2025, and it's a changed world. The United States, which has for decades been at the center of international trade and capital

flows and also the bulwark of security for the world's democracies is pulling back sharply from both roles. Tariffs hurt most manufacturing businesses of course, but some defense companies operate in a world where that affects them less. As Western democracies up spending for their own defense, how would that balance play out? First quarter earnings season for defense contractors gave us a mixed picture on how this all will play out for those companies. Sharon Turliffe covers the business for the Journal and is here to help us understand. Sharon, during their first quarter earnings calls, defense company executives gave different

accounts of how tariffs could affect them. Northrop Grumman said that additional costs are built into their contracts and so they weren't very concerned. General Dynamics said that they wouldn't answer questions about tariffs because of all the uncertainty. And then GE Aerospace and Boeing were both more specific, but they also have larger commercial footprints. Boeing, for example, said that about 80% of its commercial suppliers and about 10% of

those for defense are outside the US and could be affected by tariffs. Can you just give us some picture of how much you think they'll be hit and is anyone really totally insulated in this world? I would say nobody's totally insulated. The nature of supply chains today are parts go back and forth. There's nobody that in this industry that is reliant entirely on the United States. That said, unlike most complicated global supply chains, the supply chain for building defense products, jets, missiles, all that type of thing is much more protected and US-based

than, say, cars or home appliances. And if I look at this business, I look at defense and aerospace commercial aviation, those are two rare industries where the US actually has a manufactured good surplus with other countries. They're not a lot of businesses where you can say that about. We have a very large goods trade deficit with the rest of the world. They're understandably cautious. The executives of these companies sort of talking about whether or not that's in danger

because nonstop tariff headlines and the fact that we've antagonized some of our closest trading partners and allies. But have you heard anything? Are they concerned that they're burning bridges and that customers may basically not trust the US or not want to deal as much with them as they have in the past? Absolutely. And we're hearing that privately, but also publicly. Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg talked about there's the cost that we could incur by the parts that we have to import.

But then there's the cost of having markets shut off to us because of trade wars. And like like everything in this industry, that's complicated as well. The big news last week was China. Some Chinese airlines started literally flying planes, sending Boeing jets back to the United States rather than paying tariffs, which was painful for Boeing financially in the short term. At the same time, the reality is China relies on US parts makers and Boeing for jets, engine parts for a lot of things.

And so they quietly lifted some of their tariffs on US aerospace parts. Listen to some of the calls and reading the transcripts of the calls. They're talking about the next generation of a lot of these fighter aircrafts and missiles and air defense systems and things like that. These projects, they classically do run into cost overruns. Given all the cost cutting we have in Washington, are some of those projects in danger? I know the F-35, for example, had massive cost overruns. In order to just to make one of these things viable, you have to have foreign partners.

You have to have a certain number of purchases of them abroad, at least for some of them. There is cost cutting, as you've said, and particularly in the DOD, they're coming down on these contracts and these companies that are overspending and over budget. They're trying to tighten that up. At the same time, as there's cuts throughout the entire government, President Trump has recommended a one trillion dollar defense budget. So that would be a 12 percent increase from the prior year. So it's one sector of the government that while there's perhaps an expectation of efficiencies, there's also an expectation that there's more spending.

As much as Europe would like to be more self-reliant. The conflict there, one European industrial company CEO told us that the peace time in Europe is over and everybody's building for it and that's going to require some purchases from US companies. It seems like it's in some sense it's a golden age if you're in in the defense business, right? We saw with earnings at a time that's hard for a lot of big industrial companies, Boeing, for example, it's still burning cash, but almost half as much as it had been a year ago. So $2.3 billion in cash burn, much better than expectations. GE and RTX put estimates on how much they would lose from tariffs for GE. It was about $500 million. RTX, it was around $850 million.

Lockheed and Northrop, both forecasts that didn't thrill investors. So you saw that in their stock price. So it is very much kind of a mixed bag out there. And these companies, many of them have two legs to stand on. They have commercial side as well as the military side. Boeing has had its share of problems

the last few years related to the commercial side of its business, the military and the space side were the relative strengths. Is that diversification good for those companies right now? You'll hear executives say this is why we do this because a lot of times just the nature of air travel is when times of economic and geopolitical uncertainty people are maybe less likely to travel but that's also when defense spending goes up. So certainly a case can be made that that's good. The question is, can they execute well on the defense side?

So Boeing, they have a strong defense business in terms of demand, but they've really struggled with massive losses because they've really struggled to execute these contracts and have been losing a lot of money. In this quarter, it was actually the first time in a while they didn't take a big charge in defense, and they seemed to have started to throw things around. – Is the nature of that business different? You had Northrop Brum specifically saying,

look, these contracts have, if there are additional costs that we didn't anticipate, those are built into them. You hear about the $900 hammers and things like that that the Pentagon buys. Is it still that kind of gravy train, or are they under stricter scrutiny in terms of being able to say, our suppliers are charging us more for this material and now you're paying for it?

And it depends, and I think this is where you're seeing the variation, there's different types of defense contracts. One thing that Boeing will say is that they've typically struck contracts in which if there's cost overruns, they carry the load of that. So for Boeing, they've been taking a ton of extra costs and they've said, look, we're not going to do these contracts anymore. We're going to do contracts where the government's going to have to help if costs change and will be guaranteed more of a profit. So it really depends on where the contracts were in terms of how they'll

be affected by this change going forward. The language out of the DOD is that they're not going to tolerate these overrun behind schedule projects. The trick is when you're dealing with a program as important as the F-35 or if you think of battleships and these huge things, they can't just cut it off and go get it somewhere else. Sharon, thanks so much. That was fascinating. Great insight into how this business works. Well, thanks for having me. And that was What's News and Earnings. Today's show was produced by Charlie Duffield

and Antony Bansi with supervising producer, Michael Cosmites. Later today, we'll have the PM edition of What's News out for you as usual. And we'll be back later this earnings season, diving into another industry. Until then, I'm Spencer Jacob. Have a great day.

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