President Barack Obama will promote steps to boost U.S. exports as he visits the commercial aviation hub of Boeing Co., the planemaker at the center of a regulatory clash last year.

Obama will announce plans for Export-Import Bank financing for U.S. companies to match foreign competitors' sources of official funding and an experimental program to ease access to credit for small-business exporters, the White House said before his stop today at Boeing's jet factory in Everett, Washington, which has more than 35,000 employees.

Touring a Boeing plant gives Obama an industrial backdrop for his manufacturing initiatives and puts him at a company targeted in a 2011 National Labor Relations Board complaint that Republicans cited as evidence of hostility toward business. The case was dropped after a new union accord helped pave the way for a planned output boost at the biggest U.S. exporter.