ABOUT THIS COMPANY

ABOUT THIS COMPANY

Boeing is a company that really needs very little introduction. Indeed, it's difficult to even think the company's name without automatically adding "747" to the end of it. Or, more recently "Dreamliner" -- which, unfortunately, has an appendage of its own of late -- "delayed." Still, sometimes it's best to draw a line under what we already know, so here goes: Boeing is one of the biggest aerospace companies in the world. It's the second-largest defense contractor (after Lockheed Martin), and ranks second only to Airbus in sales and delivery of commercial jetliners. That last stat in itself is an indication of the problems caused by recent stalls in production of the hotly-anticipated 787 Dreamliner, as Boeing was top-dog in the commercial planes industry as recently as 2005. Still, when all is said and done, the company is doing pretty well for itself -- it posted record revenue of $66.4 billion in 2007 and began building the new 777 Freighter in January 2008. Boeing looks set to soar (pun intended) even higher when the Dreamliner (since its introduction, the fastest-selling commercial plane in aviation history) finally hits a runway near you.

The company has customers in more than 90 countries worldwide, and employs over 150,000 people in 48 U.S. states and 70 countries. Principal facilities are located in the Puget Sound area of Washington State (where the firm was founded), as well as in Southern California, St. Louis and the firm's Chicago HQ. The company is organized into five major sectors: commercial airplanes, which forms the majority of the firm's business; precision engagement and mobility systems; network and space systems (the firm is the lead contractor on the international space station); support systems (taken together, the last three units form the firm's Integrated Defense Systems (IDS) business); and Boeing Capital Corporation, which provides financing solutions to customers in the commercial aviation sector. In 2007, some 42 percent of the firm's revenue was generated from the U.S. government.

This is the dawning of the age of aq … aerospace

William E. Boeing founded the Pacific Aero Products Company in 1916 in Seattle, Washington, changing the company's name to Boeing a year later. The friendly aerospace and defense giant we know today isn't just the work of one man, however; by the end of the century, the firm had joined forces with four of the other founding fathers of the aerospace age -- Douglas Aircraft Co., McDonnell Aircraft Corp., North American Aviation and Hughes Aircraft -- to become the largest combined producer of commercial and military aircraft in the world, a position the firm still holds to this day.