On the very first Monday of 2013, Boeing got some bad news: There was a catastrophic battery fire on a 787 parked at Boston's Logan International Airport. Less than two weeks later, a second battery meltdown on another Dreamliner prompted an emergency landing in Japan.
Government regulators responded quickly. The Federal Aviation Administration ordered the entire fleet of 787s grounded indefinitely.
The planes sat on the ground for more than three months while investigators and engineers figured out how to fix their overheating lithium ion batteries. Deliveries of new 787s were halted, too.
But Boeing's stock never really faltered. In fact, the airplane manufacturer's stock price grew 80 percent over 2013, one of the market's best performers.
As Carter Leake, an investment banker at BB&T Capital Markets and a longtime industry observer, puts it, Wall Street "shrugged off" the 787 battery problem "because they made the correct bet that Boeing would be able to get through this."
But beyond that, Leake says, investors were focused on the company's large and growing backlog of orders for its other airplanes.
"The smart money saw that the 737, the 777 — the aircraft that had the highest margins and the highest cash flow — were on track. Demand was at all-time high and production rates were likely to go even higher, which they did," he says.
Keep in mind that Boeing has just one real competitor for large commercial jets: Europe's Airbus.
Boeing launched its newest line of planes, the 777X, at the Dubai air show in November. The redesigned version of the existing 777 model won a record number of orders, totaling $95 billion at list prices.
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