(Photo by Northrup Grumman; minor adjustments by Lee Ferran / Code and Dagger.)
The gargantuan military contracting firms that do the most business with the U.S. government have released their year-end financial reports, showing some taking a hit but most thriving during a year otherwise defined by a business-killing coronavirus pandemic.
Code and Dagger previously reported that the largest of them all, Lockheed Martin, managed to increase its sales to $65.4 billion — including over $8.6 billion in “consolidated operating profit” for 2020. Raytheon increased its sales relative to 2019 even more.
RELATED: What Pandemic? Lockheed Announces Billions in Sales, Profit for 2020
Later in the week the other three biggest companies — Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Boeing — released their financials as well, to something more of a mixed bag. A mixed bag in which each did billions upon billions of dollars in business, but still.
Like Lockheed, Northrop reported (PDF) a significant increase in sales, some 9 percent more than 2019, to $36.8 billion. Each one of its major divisions, from aeronautics to space systems, saw a sales increase — with space systems doing about $100 million more business in 2020 than the prior year.
[Editor’s Note: These figures are astronomical and sometimes hard to really wrap your head around. So, for reference, to make $1 billion, an elementary or middle school teacher in the U.S. would have to work for approximately 15,700 years at their current average yearly salary — not including taxes. The 9 percent increase in sales for Northrup, representing about $3 billion, is equivalent to the GDP of Greenland.]
RELATED: Meet ‘Pentagon Spending Bot’: An Automated Eye on What the Military Does With Your Tax Dollars
General Dynamics reported (PDF) $37.9 billion in revenue in 2020, $1.4 billion less than the year before. It’s net earnings was $3.7 billion, down $317 million from the year before.
The company said “orders remained strong,” and highlighted several deals with the government as evidence: a $9.5 billion contract for two Navy submarines, a potential $4.4 billion deal to help the Defense Department with Microsoft Office 365, and another potential $3.3 billion from the State Department for “business process support services.”
The company to take the biggest pandemic-related hit was Boeing, which stomached a 24 percent drop in revenues — from $76.6 billion in 2019 to $58.2 billion in 2020. The company said it was “significantly impacted” by COVID-19, but also by high-profile problems with its 737 MAX among other issues.
As such, the company’s “commercial airplanes” segment was hit hardest. But there was an ever-reliable bright spot: military contracting. While the rest of the company’s revenues shrank, Boeing’s “defense, space and security” division held steady, doing $26.3 billion in revenue in 2020, approximately $200 million above its 2019 figure of $26.1 billion.
But the military contracting wasn’t just done with the American military. Boeing’s report cited lucrative deals with the governments of Japan, South Korea, and, in their global services division, Singapore, Qatar and New Zealand.
“Backlog at Defense, Space [and] Security was $61 billion, of which 32 percent represents orders from customers outside the U.S.,” the report says.
The stocks of each major contractor are down from pre-pandemic levels, though they’ve recovered from the market dive in late February 2020.
PRIMARY SOURCE: Northrup Grumman Reports Fourth Quarter and Full-Year 2020 Financial Results (PDF)
PRIMARY SOURCE: General Dynamics Reports Fourth Quarter and Full-Year 2020 Financial Results (PDF)
PRIMARY SOURCE: Boeing Reports Fourth-Quarter Results (PDF)
[Do you have a tip or question for Code and Dagger? Send it along at CodeAndDagger@protonmail.com. And if you like what you read and want to help keep the site running (kind of) smoothly, click here to learn how you can lend your support. ]