Brazil's Embraer cuts losses but ends 2020 in the red

SAO PAULO — Brazilian aircraft-manufacturer Embraer said on Friday it cut its losses to $3.3 million in the fourth quarter, but ended pandemic-hit 2020 with a total net loss of $731.9 million, more than double the previous year.

Embraer, the world's third-biggest plane-maker, after Airbus and Boeing, has been gradually recovering from the devastation that COVID-19 restrictions wrought on the aviation industry last year, but its future remains murky.

It said it had opted not to release guidance on expected financial results or plane deliveries for 2021, "due to continued uncertainty related to the COVID-19 pandemic and its impacts on the industry”.

Still, things are looking better for the company than when it first suspended its guidance a year ago.

Its net loss of $3.3 million for the last three months of the year was an improvement on both the $209.8 million it lost in the same period in 2019 and its loss of $121.2 million in the third quarter of 2020.

The full-year result was more than double its net loss of $322.3 million for 2019.

"The company's aircraft deliveries in 2020 were negatively impacted principally by the COVID-19 pandemic that continues to affect the world, especially commercial air travel," Embraer said in a statement.

"Annual commercial jet deliveries [44] declined 51 per cent in 2020 as compared to the 89 jet deliveries the company registered in 2019," it said.

"Executive jet deliveries [86] were less impacted, falling 21 per cent relative to the 2019 deliveries of 109 jets."

Exacerbating its difficult 2020, Embraer suffered a break-up in April with troubled US aerospace giant Boeing, which announced it was abandoning plans for a $4.2-billion deal to buy the Brazilian company's commercial plane division.

However, in a sign of the recent uptick for Embraer, more than half its deliveries last year were in the fourth quarter — 71 out of a total of 130.