Make or Buy

On 8 December 2025 Boeing completed its purchase of Spirit AeroSystems and took back the Wichita, Kansas plant it had sold twenty years earlier. Chapter 1 gave the terms: about $8.3 billion including Spirit's debt, about 15,000 employees at five sites, the work for Airbus going to Airbus (reported). What it did not ask was why a company would sell a plant and then pay so much more to buy it back, and why it would do so at the moment its supplier was weakest.

The plant Boeing sold in June 2005 was a mature, build-to-print operation making 737 fuselages and parts for its other aircraft. Onex bought it for about $1.2 billion, about $900 million in cash and about $300 million of assumed liabilities (reported). Selling freed capital and cut costs, and for Onex it was an excellent trade: its group put in about $375 million and had received about $3.2 billion by August 2014, after Spirit listed on the New York Stock Exchange on 21 November 2006 (reported). Spirit then did what independent suppliers are supposed to do. It won work from other customers, including wing and fuselage work for Airbus, and in October 2020 completed the purchase of Bombardier's aerostructures plants in Belfast, Casablanca and Dallas, for $500 million in cash plus about $130 million of pension contributions at signing (company). It still depended on Boeing for most of its revenue, under long-term agreements that set the price of each fuselage.

The trouble arrived through those agreements. Boeing pressed Spirit on price; the 737 MAX grounding of 2019–20 cut its volume; Boeing then wanted fuselages faster than Spirit could build them well. In June 2023 about 6,000 members of the machinists' union in Wichita struck for six days, from 24 to 29 June, and won a four-year contract that Spirit said would cost about $80 million a year more in labour (company). In August 2023 Spirit disclosed misdrilled holes in aft pressure bulkheads; its chief executive, Tom Gentile, left the board on 30 September and Patrick Shanahan took over as interim chief executive (reported). Then came the door plug of 5 January 2024, on a Spirit-built fuselage, reworked and closed without its bolts in Boeing's own factory (Chapter 1). Under the FAA's cap Boeing could take fewer fuselages; Spirit, built and staffed for more, burned cash. On 18 April 2024 Boeing agreed to advance it $425 million against future deliveries; at the end of 2024 Spirit held $537 million of cash with access to up to $350 million more in Boeing advances (company, reported).