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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