Boeing Co. 737 Max fuselages at the company’s manufacturing facility in Renton, Washington, on April 15, 2025.
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Boeing‘s airplane deliveries to China will resume next month after handovers were paused amid a trade war with the Trump administration, CEO Kelly Ortberg said Thursday, as he brushed off the impact of tit-for-tat tariffs with some of the United States’ largest trading partners this year.
Ortberg had said last month that China had paused deliveries.
“China has now indicated … they’re going to take deliveries,” Ortberg said. The first deliveries will be next month,” he told a Bernstein conference on Thursday.
Boeing, a top U.S. exporter, whose output of airplanes help soften the U.S. trade deficit, has been paying tariffs on imported components from Italy and Japan for its wide-body Dreamliner planes, which are made in South Carolina, Ortberg said, adding that much of it can be recouped when the planes are exported again.
“The only duties that we would have to cover would be the duties for a delivery, say, to a U.S. airline,” he said.
Regarding the overall rapidly changing trade policies that have included several pauses and some exemptions, Ortberg said, “I personally don’t think these will be … permanent in the long term.”
He reiterated that Boeing plans to ramp up production this year of its best-selling 737 Max jet, which will require Federal Aviation Administration approval.
The FAA capped output of the workhorse plans at 38 a month last year after a door plug that wasn’t secured when it left Boeing’s factory blew out midair in the first minutes of an Alaska Airlines flight.
Ortberg said the company could produce 42 Max jets a month by midyear and ramp up to about 47 a month by the end of the year.
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