WHBM
That's not quite an accurate representation. While they may be "cash positive" on current work, in terms of labour, components, current assembly hall costs, etc, there is the most enormous debt for the R&D, prototype production, and all the money borrowed to fund the production of earlier aircraft that didn't get delivered or any revenue for a long time. That has to be paid back from current production revenue. It's also difficult to know correctly how cash positive each aircraft is because the price each carrier has paid for each is commercially very confidential. But the USD 25m is still very much being taken up by the cost of all the borrowing used to fund those past costs. I don't think the shareholders have seen anything yet, and in fact Boeing has extended the production run over which they are absorbing these past expenses.
I am not sure your rendition is accurate either. In the United States, Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) require companies to treat R&D as an expense in the year spent. This impacts a number of things leading to sometimes wildly different calculations of economic profit. So, is R&D an expense or is it an investment, an investment into the future as it was with the Boeing 787 aircraft? Some think that R should be expensed each year, but D capitalized once the asset being developed has been deemed technically and commercially feasible. A simpler approach is to treat both as capital or an investment.
If you look at Boeing, 2008-2010 were the years of heavy 787 R&D expenditures. If you look at these years using GAAP (which the US government does) for Boeing's net income it looks like this:
2008 $2.8B
2009 $1.3B
2010 $3.3B
Boeing had had a terrible 2009, right? But actually, it related to the timing of the largest R&D investment:
2008 $3.7B
2009 $6.5B
2010 $4.1B
Now if you adjust net income for the R&D volatility, e.g., Net Income + R&D
2008 $6.4B
2009 $7.8B
2010 $7.4B
2009 was a better year than 2008
But now you amortize the R&D investment over it life to be realistic to obtain Boeing's Adjusted Earnings:
2008 $3.0B
2009 $4.8B
2010 $4.4B
The point is, Boeing invested heavily in 2009 to position themselves for cash flow generation for the future years.
Aside from this, Boeing has experienced really good earnings growth from 2009 to today when you take out the volatility of R&D investments year to year.