New York, Jan 29 (efe-epa).- American planemaker Boeing stumbled to a net loss of $636 million in 2019 - its first annual net loss in decades - due to the worldwide grounding of its flagship aircraft.

In its latest quarterly earnings statement released Wednesday, the company also said that its revenues last year fell by 24 percent to $76.6 billion and that in the final quarter of 2019 it took an additional pre-tax charge of $2.6 billion to cover more potential concessions and other consideration to airlines affected by the grounding of the 737 Max.

"We recognize we have a lot of work to do," Boeing's new chief executive officer, Dave Calhoun, said. "We are focused on returning the 737 Max to service safely and restoring the long-standing trust that the Boeing brand represents with the flying public."

He added that the strength of the planemaker's overall portfolio of businesses "provides the financial liquidity to follow a thorough and disciplined recovery process."

Boeing's results in 2019 (its first net loss since 1997) contrasted sharply with those of the previous year, when the Chicago-based planemaker posted net income of more than $10 billion thanks to record high revenues of more than $101 billion.

The company also set a new mark for plane deliveries in 2018 of 806, although that figure plunged to 380 last year.

The 737 Max fleet has been grounded worldwide since March 2019 due to a pair of plane crashes in Ethiopia and Indonesia that left 346 dead and were blamed on a defect in that model's flight-control system.

Boeing has been working with regulators to fix those aircraft but said last week that it does not expect the 737 Max to be approved to fly again until the summer.

Boeing's fourth-quarter results, a focus of investors' attention because they reflect the company's most recent decisions, also were down sharply from the October-December 2018 period, with the planemaker posting a net loss of $1.01 billion compared with net income of $3.4 billion in that earlier quarter.

The company's fourth-quarter revenues fell 37 percent year-over-year to $17.9 billion, mainly due to fewer commercial aircraft deliveries (79, down from 238 in the fourth quarter of 2018).

In addition to the extra pre-tax charge to compensate airlines, Boeing also said in the annual report that the estimated costs to produce 737 Max aircraft increased by $2.6 billion during the quarter.

The company furthermore said it will incur a cost of approximately $4 billion in "abnormal production costs" resulting from the suspension of 737 Max production and low production rates once production resumes.

Those additional costs and charges associated with the grounding of the 737 Max amount to nearly $19 billion, up sharply from previous forecasts.

Shares of Boeing, which has lost more than 18 percent of its market value over the past 12 months, were up around 1.5 percent in morning trading on the New York Stock Exchange. EFE

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