Posted: Wed, Oct 16, 2002, 2:07 PM ET (1807 GMT)
The Boeing Company announced Wednesday that it has written off a multi-million dollar investment in broadband satellite company Teledesic, citing Teledesic's plans to stop work on its satellite constellation and reduce staff. In Boeing's third quarter financial results, the company said that it took a $100 million pre-tax charge on its Space and Communications business unit to write off its equity investment in Teledesic; elsewhere in the results the company said the size of the Teledesic write-off was $63 million. Teledesic announced early this month that it was suspending work on its satellite constellation, citing the difficultly of raising the money needed to build and deploy its spacecraft. The write-off caused the Space and Communications unit suffer a $36 million loss in the quarter. The commercial satellite unit is suffering from cost growth that is being "vigorously addressed," Boeing CEO Phil Condit said in a statement. The company said that it believes the commercial space market will remain soft through 2003 because of reduced demand for building and launching communications satellites. It expects the market to remain "highly competitive" with government requirements driving satellite and launch demand over the next few years.

Related Links:

•  Boeing press release