Ambassador Kennedy brings to the Boeing board professional, diplomatic, and global perspectives that are highly valued in our rapidly evolving and increasingly competitive global business environment. Her diversity of experience and accompanying insights will broaden and strengthen our board in its deliberative and oversight roles for the company.
We continue to see acquisitions as an opportunity area for us. It's one of the tools that we use to grow.
Our first use of cash is invested organically, secondly returning values our shareholders - roughly 100 percent free cash flow. And then thirdly, mergers, acquisitions, partnerships that complement our organic strategy. We are going to continue down that path.
I have always loved aeroplanes and spacecraft and the design element.
I've always thought of Boeing as the premier aerospace company in the world, so as I was coming up through school, it was the company I aspired to work for.
If you want to work in engineering and to have an impact that's global, come work in the aerospace sector.
Aerospace services represents one of our biggest growth opportunities for the future.
If the U.S. doesn't have an export credit agency, which is what the Export-Import Bank is, then we can't compete with other countries that do. Every other country in the world that competes in aerospace has an export credit agency.
As you begin to create more destinations, that will naturally create a stronger economic pipeline for space. And just as we have been the leader of commercial air travel for the first century, as we look to the second century of aviation, I would expect Boeing to be the leader in both air and space travel.
As we continue to drive the benefits of integrating our enterprise skills, capabilities, and experience - what we call operating as 'One Boeing' - we will find new and better ways to engage and inspire employees, deliver innovation that drives customer success, and produce results to fuel future growth and prosperity for all our stakeholders.
President Trump has had business leaders at the table. He's listening; he's engaging and making decisions that will help us grow the economy and, ultimately, U.S. manufacturing jobs.
As we deliver airplanes and we enable global travel and global cargo delivery, it provides overall economic growth around the world as well.
If the U.S. were to not reauthorize the Ex-Im bank, it's in essence unilaterally disarming in a globally competitive environment.
First thing we're going to do with the benefits of tax reform is we're going to invest in innovation. We're going to invest in capital, new product lines. It's going to create more manufacturing jobs and our shareholders are going to benefit, too. We're going to improve dividends, share repurchase.
By harnessing our teammates' unique skills and passion for giving, our professional networks and partnerships, and our financial resources, we will inspire the dreamers and doers of tomorrow and drive positive, lasting change in our communities across the globe.
When you think about our 13,000 small and medium businesses in America that are part of our supply chain, and that's more than 1.5 million manufacturing jobs. So it's a significant job generator.
I think it's really important that we have a level playing field for global trade.
I think the work on tax reform, the work that's being done on regulatory reform is very important. And just having a seat at the table, I think, is so important for business today as we think about what's going to benefit the economy of this country, how we're going to create great manufacturing jobs.
We're not going to see an exclusively robotic factory, but we will see the optimum use of robots and people.
If we ramp up capabilities in China, including additional 737-related work, the actions that we'll take are actions that ultimately allow us to grow jobs in the U.S.
