Singapore Technologies Aerospace (ST Aerospace) ranks as the
world's largest third-party commercial airframe MRO provider,
according to Overhaul & Maintenance's latest biennial survey
(see World Top 10 list ) of heavy maintenance operations.
Despite sluggish economic conditions and 9/11's devastating impact
on the international airline industry, both ST Aerospace, which
reported just more than 6.0 million man-hours last year, and
runner-up Lufthansa Technik, with 5.5 million man-hours,
aggressively expanded their franchises through acquisitions and
joint ventures in the past two years, allowing them to capture
greater shares of a market deflated by the accelerated retirement
of older airframes.
As cost pressures continue to mount, an increasing number of
airlines are considering outsourcing heavy maintenance work, so our
list in 2005 could look quite different. However, because wholly
owned airline shops account for 50% of our World Top 10 list and
those facilities likely will continue to capture the majority of
work from their own carriers, will our 2005 list look very
different? Possibly, because seven strong contenders are not far
behind.
This is the third time we have ranked the world's largest airframe
MRO providers. Our last effort appeared in the June 2001 issue. As
in the past, we again used airframe man-hours to gauge size.
Measuring size by revenue opens up too many variables that would
allow disproportionate comparisons, as would tabulating our lists
by number of aircraft serviced due to widely varying job
complexities.
Two years ago, we based our survey on man-hours only from
individual facilities, regardless of whether one company owned
several operations. We changed that policy this year because the
multi-facility business model is an increasingly important element
of the full service concept embraced by so many competitors in the
market. So, for example, ST Aero's World Top 10 number of 6.05
million man-hours includes the performance of all of its wholly
owned subsidiaries. At the regional levels, we only included the
facilities located within that region when compiling the Top 10
lists.
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