What Is Boeing's Most Profitable Plane?

Did you know that the Boeing 777 is one of the plane maker's most profitable airplanes? Photo source: Boeing. Everyone knows that Boeing is a plane maker. That's what they do. But Boeing makes a lot of planes, and a lot of different kinds of planes -- from the ultrapopular 737 to the iconic 747 jumbo jet to the paradigm-shifting 787 "composite" Dreamliner. At last count, the company had something on the order of 5,800 plane orders stacked up in backlog, awaiting construction and delivery. Any time Boeing sells one of these planes, that's good news for investors because, on one hand, it's new revenue for Boeing. On the other, it's a sale that won't be going to archrival Airbus. One key question that Boeing investors might want to ask, though, is this: Which of these planes makes the most profit for Boeing? That's what we're going to look into today. What Boeing tells us When it comes to which of its planes earn the most money for Boeing, the company isn't in any rush to spell that out for investors. Here's just a sampling of how Boeing "explains" this, drawn from its 10-K filing with the SEC: Our Commercial Airplanes segment predominantly uses program accounting to account for cost of sales related to its programs. Program accounting is applicable to products manufactured for delivery under production-type contracts where profitability is realized over multiple contracts and years. Under program accounting, inventoriable production costs, program tooling and other non-recurring costs, and warranty costs are accumulated and charged to cost of sales by program instead of by individual units or contracts. Clear as mud, right? Of course, the upshot of all this is probably well understood by Boeing investors. Basically, the company tallies up what it expects to spend developing, building, and warranting a particular airplane model, estimates the number of units of that model that it expects to sell, subtracts the former from the latter, and divides by the estimate -- to arrive at an estimate of the profit earned from selling each unit of airplane. But that doesn't tell us which specific airplanes are the most profitable for Boeing.