StandardAero, Inc. (SARO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. Good afternoon. I'm Doug Harned, Bernstein's aerospace and defense analyst. And I'm really happy today to have with us StandardAero. So we've got Russ Ford, CEO, Chairman; Alex Trapp, who's Head of Strategy; and Rama Bondada, Investor Relations. So to start off here, Russ, maybe you can give us an overview of the company for those who may be less familiar with it.

Sure. Be happy to. Thank you, Doug. Welcome, everyone. StandardAero is the world's largest independent service provider for jet engines. We've been around since the dawn of powered aviation. We're about to start our 115th year of continuous operations. So pretty sure the 2 gentlemen that started the company, Mr. Pearce and Mr. Bickell probably knew Orbital and Wilbur right back in the day. You don't get to be in business for 115 years by accident. We started out actually originally in providing engine services for automotive. In 1911, the aerospace industry was still very much experimental. But by the end of the first World War and ever since, we focused exclusively on doing service for aerospace engines. We are organized in 2 end market segments. One being engine services and the other being component repair services for engines. The Engine Services segment focuses on commercial aircraft engines, military aircraft engines, private business jet engines as well as helicopter and ground power energy-based engines. So across the entire spectrum of where gas turbines are utilized, pretty much anything that flies, some things that don't actually have gas turbine engines. We operate in 50 facilities in 12 countries, and we have customers in more than 80 countries. So you pretty much can pick any time zone in the world and StandardAero has a facility there. And we provide entire -- an entire array of engine services once any engine reaches a repair interval, it's typically removed from the aircraft, sent back to StandardAero at one of our facilities where you'll receive whatever the maintenance requirements are, everything from a minor check and inspect all the way up to a complete engine disassembly, a full maintenance event that we call a PRSV. So we provide that entire spectrum. We have about 8,000 employees across those different facilities. We are purposefully structured across the subsegments of aerospace so that we don't have any concentration in just one of those subsectors. That's a conscious decision because in aerospace, as I'm sure you know, aerospace is a highly cyclical business. It always has been since the dawn of commercial flight in the 1920s, aerospace has been cyclical and it likely always will be. The trick for us is when it comes to the maintenance on engines and aircraft, the maintenance is driven by how the engine is operated, meaning whatever aircraft it goes in and what the mission of that aircraft is. And that can be very different for a commercial engine versus a military engine. The maintenance requirements are quite different across those different subsectors. So it's important that as we built the company over the years, we purposefully have put together these different subsegments that operate on different cycles. So not everything moves up or down at the same time. And as a result, when it comes to perturbations within the market, even up to and including extreme things like a pandemic or a worldwide financial crisis or even just the normal cyclicality within aerospace, not everything is up at the same time or down at the same time. And so by not having overly concentrated focuses in these subsegments, what we've created is a natural hedge in the actual revenue in the business that runs through the company because the cycles typically they counterbalance each other. So that's an important element, I think, of our company. And one of the things that has made us as a newly minted public company, even though we've been around 115 years, we've been a public company now. We just celebrated our first anniversary about 60 days ago. And it's one of the things that suits us well for the public environment is that we have an operating practice for 100 years of being very predictable about the way we run the business and how the business operates. So it's a highly rational type of business that does not see the volatility that some other areas of the aerospace industry, particularly airlines which interface directly with the flying public, we don't see the volatility that they do because maintenance events occur over a period of years and the hours that are flown during that time, which generates a maintenance event. So as flight loading moves up and down day by day, hour by hour, we don't see that volatility. We tend to ride through that a lot more smoothly where we sit in the ecosystem. So that's just kind of a brief overview of the company.

Russ, one of the things you said there is you've got these sort of different end markets. But I have to say, when you look at it right now, all the end markets are going in a good direction. Perhaps you could give us a little bit of a picture. I know you had a very good quarter for business aviation last quarter. But maybe you could characterize how you're looking at the growth rates of those different segments, business, but large commercial and defense.

Yes. They're all different, but you're correct. They are all moving up. And so fortunately, for us, when you have situations where all of the markets tend to move at the same direction upward, which is where that would likely happen. During the pandemic, the commercial piece moved down for a short period of time, but offsetting that was business aviation and military, which all moved up to help counterbalance. But in the good times where things all seem to be moving upward like right now, then we're very happy because we have rich people problems. We're trying to eat as much of that as we can. Fortunately, we have the ability to surge capacity between sites or within a site with our workforce and with the certifications that we have. So it's something that they typically don't move at exactly the same time. So we can flex and move the workforce around. We do have open capacity. We don't run at 100% utilization. We do have the ability to surge on off shifts and weekends. So we are not limited by our testing capability. We're not limited by facilities. We're not limited by tooling because we're not running 3 shifts 7 days. So there is some surge capacity to take into account any time you have things moving forward. And what we are seeing is you'll see a low double-digit growth in some of the businesses like commercial and like business aviation. You'll see high single-digit growth in other areas like military and helicopter. So that's what we're experiencing now. That's what we expect to see in the near term.

Yes. And when you -- one of the things you know -- I've talked about this before, sometimes people will look at MRO, and they'll say, well, MRO, it's just rents turning. Anybody can do that. There's not a high barrier to entry. I know you all believe they're, in fact, you have some serious barriers to the competitors right now. So maybe you could talk us through that.

Yes. Yes, I appreciate that. And the answer is there are some people, the same people that say that working on a jet engine is just turning wrenches. Those same people would say that heart surgery is just sewing things together. It's a little more complicated than that, okay? And when you work on a jet engine that has thousands of parts that have tolerances of 1,000 or 2,000, 10,000 of an inch and they turn at speeds of 20,000 to 60,000 RPM and they have very specialized coatings and everyone who touches those engines has to be licensed in order to do that. It's more complicated than just turning wrenches on some other mechanical device. And so some of the barriers to entry as a result of that is, first of all, you have to recognize that not just any company can work on a jet engine. And it's not because of capability, but it's because of the licensing and regulatory environment. On an aircraft, the engine is the most critical flight system for an airplane. You can lose a lot of stuff on an airplane at 30,000 feet and still land the airplane safely. The engine is not one of those things. So the engine has the most highly regulated environment because of its criticality to flight. So consequently, you have to have regulatory approval from all of the regulatory agencies around the world to begin with. So beyond the FAA, there's EASA, there's CASA, there's a myriad of regulatory, governmental regulatory agencies that you have to have authorizations. Then beyond that, there's authorizations you have to get from every individual OEM. So General Electric, Rolls-Royce, Pratt, Honeywell, Safran, the 5 major engine producers, you have to have authorizations from those folks as well. These authorizations take years to get. Secondly, once you have the authorization, you have to have a workforce that is licensed to be able to do the work. Once again, the technicians that work on these engines, they have to have licenses that take years to get. You can't just get somebody down the learning curve in a couple of months. Third, you have to have the facilities to not only build the jet engine, but more importantly, you have to be able to test the engine. Anytime you do maintenance work of any order of magnitude on a jet engine, that engine must be run in flight simulated conditions for hours. It's not like an automobile where you take it in for an oil change and they give you the keys and say, "Drive it home and if it makes noise, bring it back to us." You can't do that at 30,000 feet. So those engines have to be run in dedicated test cells for hours before they're allowed to be bolted onto an aircraft and go fly people in the airplane. Those test cells are complicated to build and complicated to correlate. It takes 3 or 4 years to build and correlate a test cell and these things cost anywhere from $50 million to $100 million each. So test cells are a very significant barrier. That's why you'll find many MRO companies don't even have test cells, but if they have the authorizations to do the work, they'll have to send the engines to either the OE or to a company like us to have the testing done. Some companies may have a handful of test cells because of the expense and the capital infrastructure. StandardAero has more than 50 of these test cells. Think about the infrastructural cost of putting that in place. It's taken us years to do that. So you've got to have the testing capability in addition to the regulatory, the OE and the technical certifications. You also have to have access to all of the technical specs from the OEMs, which are not generally available to just any company. So you have to have access to the technical specs. You also have -- because when you get access to the technical specs in many instances, the OEs are giving you access to intellectual property. And they guard that fiercely because that's what they've invested in when they spend a couple of billion dollars in 10 years developing a new engine, they've developed intellectual property along the way, and they protect that. So you have to have relationships with the OEs that demonstrate to them that you can protect their IP. And you can't demonstrate that to them in a year or 2. You have to demonstrate that to them over decades, many years of programs where you have protected their IP. StandardAero has that pedigree with all of the OEs. So there are some very significant barriers to entry, which is why not just any company can work on a jet engine. There's a lot of companies that can work on other parts of the airplane because many people can bend sheet metal and buck rivets, but you don't want those same people digging around in the hot section of your jet engine that must operate all the time without reserve.

And Doug, I would add to that, of the 8,000 employees we have, average tenure for our mechanics are 20 years. The learning curve to -- come down the learning curve is 3 to 5 years. So it's not like somebody can wake up and say, okay, I'm going to build $2.5 billion of test cells and then go out there and try to start an MRO business. The learning curve and the retention and the experience of the workforce is critical business.

So when you look at the Engine Services business, this is like you all now about a 15% type margin business. So given the barriers to entry here, one might think, you could price higher. There's obviously a lot of demand out there. Perhaps you could talk about what drives the margin profile here, if we can expect margin expansion. We'll get to the component repairs in a little bit. But in that Engine Services business, how should we expect margins to flow going forward?

Yes. So I'm going to pull in CRS a little bit for an example of what the margins look like in ES. So margins in CRS were about 30% EBITDA. right? And that's 20% material and 80% labor at CRS. Those same labor margins are also in Engine Services. The Engine Services margins are also 30% at labor or higher. And then -- but the difference is that in Engine Services, it's 80% material and only 20% labor. So the material washes it out.

And that material is a flow-through that's pass-through.

A good chunk of that, about $1 billion of that -- it's about a -- call it, $5 billion business, about 20% to 25% of that is 0 to close to 0 margin where we just get a handling fee. And then the remaining material, we get some margin on it, but it's not as anywhere near what the labor margins are. And so that's kind of what skews it into that mid-teens kind of. But actually, it is a very high-margin business to begin with because of the difficulty of, one, finding an MRO slot fewer the airline. And then two, just there's not a lot of capacity out there on a go-forward basis, too.

But you've got -- so right now, you've got a couple of really important programs, the LEAP, CFM56 that you're still coming down the learning curve on those. And so those are a little bit dilutive to margins. But how should we think about this if you got through those programs, can we expect to see some margin expansion in the overall business?

So what we said at our last earnings call is that 2025 represents the bottom for margins in this LEAP and 56 Dallas ramp. We expect to see margin improvement on a go-forward basis. One, so LEAP and 56 Dallas will hit breakeven in early 2026 and then begin to start their climb up to becoming accretive to the segment level by the end of the decade. We also talked about the pass-through revenue that we're taking out about $350 billion of this low single-digit kind of margin revenue that's coming out. The combination of those 2 kind of help give that margin climb up. And so yes, we would -- historically speaking, Engine Services is roughly a 50 to 70 basis point margin improvement story. Yes, annually. Yes, and 20 basis points has been primarily from acquisition. So really, it's close to like 50 basis points. And so we should start getting back on that trend build again, as we put in the decks here with coming down the learning curve on LEAP and 56...

Now if I turn over to the other business, component repair services, that's where you make the 30% type margins. And also, you're looking at double-digit growth, I think, as well. Can you talk about how you get to that profile, that double-digit growth combined with the higher margin?

Yes, sure. It's a combination of things. First of all, our component repair business does repairs on components for not only standard aero engine services products, but for the open market. So other MRO shops, even the OEs, they send components to us for our repair capability. As a matter of fact, almost 90% of the revenue that runs through our component repair business comes from outside of standard era. Some of it, however, though, comes from our own Engine Services segment, and our Engine Services segment is going to be growing pretty significantly because of the new programs that we're adding on top of the existing baseload of work. So we see big growth coming from LEAP as a new commercial engine, CFM56 as a commercial engine that is just now hitting its -- almost half of that is just now hitting its first shop visit. CF-34, which is an engine that is still in production on regional jets, and we've captured a large share of the market on that particular program. On the Business Aviation Group, HTF7000 is the latest engine from Honeywell that is probably the most ubiquitous engine in the business aviation world on super midsized aircraft. And then also, we have a big turboprop business that does work on things like PW100s and 127s, the engines that power some of the aircraft like ATR 72s and Q400s. Those are the big growth drivers. And as those engine programs grow, we will in-source work from those engine programs into the CRS segment. As we continue to add repairs to our CRS segment, we will be able to drive more work inside also because we're developing repairs that we don't currently have. And those repairs, they still have to be done. So we have to take them to outside sources. And when we develop those repairs, then all that work just comes back inside. So there's the indigenous growth of the existing platforms. There is growth from additional in-sourcing as we develop more repairs. And then finally, the third leg of the stool is through inorganic acquisition business.

And then I would add and pricing. So these are -- component repair is a kind of a -- it's similar to OEM pricing kind of model. And so we get some pretty good pricing there, too.

Okay. And because of that, what's the outlook for CRS in terms of margins? Can we expect expansion beyond the kind of 10% level you're at?

Yes. So I would say that when you look at CRS margins, this year was a phenomenal year. We had almost 400 basis points of margin improvement. Traditionally, this is a 50 to 100 basis points kind of margin improvement story, mainly because of pricing. But what's happened is -- and then also the in-sourcing opportunity that we continuously get. But we -- Alex did an amazing acquisition with AeroTurbine that now has fully come into the company. We tend to be very aggressive in assimilating those acquisitions, and it has far exceeded our expectations. And so that really is what rebased the margins there higher into this like a high 20s, 30% range. But it is a business that should see steady margin improvement. And it's also a little bit of a mix, right? Like it will be depending -- it's very mix dependent on what the work scopes are that are coming in and which parts are getting used and which parts can be replaced with a component repair.

So if I take the LEAP, I would argue, whether it's repairs or whether it's services, that is probably the highest growth program that anybody has ever seen in this industry. And you are 1 of 5 now called premier players on this. But some people have said to me, oh, well, MTU just got one. Now they're the sixth. What does it mean to be a premier player on this? What kind of advantage does it give you? And how does that growth look?

Yes. So it starts with being a big shop, right? So you have to be a big credible player to be a premier MRO, and you had a lot of the names of the 6 providers, you'll find that to be the common thread. Again, Russ mentioned decades of proven experience working with the OEMs in an aligned way. Them, right, having decades of relationship experience kind of doing business the right way, building trust over that period of time. The infrastructure to stand up the capability. So it's no small short to stand up a new engine platform industry. You have to have the physical footprint. You have to have the ability to onboard, train employees, by the tooling, bringing together the entire kind of cellular operation plus have a test cell, right? If you don't have a test cell that can test, then you're going to be waiting for years and to be able to get a capability put in place, the OEM is not going to sort of look at you first if you don't have that infrastructure already in place. And of course, since CFM has designed this premier MRO network to face the customer base the airlines directly instead of the OEM going to the customers and pushing work to the MRO providers. They expect the premier MROs to go straight to the airlines and sell parts through the premier MROs as a channel, right? That's how they make their money selling parts. We consume their parts, but we're dealing directly with the airlines. So you have to have a global sales team to operate in a global market and you have to have a bid team that knows how to bid complex RFPs that airlines require with their very fast-growing fleets in a world where nobody really understands the engine just yet, right? It's new technology. And so everybody is trying to get their head around what the best structure approach is to doing maintenance. So you got to have a team that can accommodate that. So those are some of the key factors that allow us to take a position there, and you'll see that pretty consistently with those particular 6, right? There's not a lot of big companies that can do that.

The -- one of the questions I get a lot is -- this is such a good business. Why doesn't GE just do it all themselves? I think we all know GE is deliberately trying to move work out. But maybe just comment on that.

Yes. That's not just a GE issue. That is a fundamental maturation within the aerospace ecosystem. And so you have to look back over the last 30 years. And what you'll see is there have always been 3 main components of the aerospace ecosystem. On one end of the spectrum, you have the OEMs that design, develop and certify new airplanes and new engines. And it takes all of their critical resources, both cash and engineering to do that. On the other end of the spectrum, you have the operators. So these are airlines or their militaries that operate. The center piece, the third piece, which is the bridge between those 2 is the maintenance piece, which is where we fit. So the OEs over time, what's happened is the OEs on the left-hand side have started to focus their clinical resources on the development of new engines and they don't want to or can't spend the resources on developing buildings and additional test cells and maintenance techniques for the thousands of engines that they have deployed into the market over the last 40 years. They don't want to, they can't do that. So that work has been moving towards the center. On the right-hand side, you have the operators. And similarly, airlines since deregulation in the mid-80s, they have been -- had to be a lot more cost competitive, and they can no longer afford to do maintenance on aircraft as their -- one of their primary investments. They focus on flight operations. So over the last 20, 30 years, you've seen work from the airlines move towards the center. There are still some airlines that do some maintenance. But by and large, that both of those things have moved towards the center. And that's where we're at, so the work migrates to us. Could airlines do more engine maintenance? Sure, but they'd have to go invest a lot of time and money to build up test cells and things to do that. Could the OEs do a lot more of this work? Well, sure, they could, but they have better ways to spend their engineering resources and their dollars, and that is developing new engines and producing parts where they make money. They don't make money on doing the actual maintenance work because at the end of the day, the reason that the OEs and the airlines cannot really compete on the maintenance piece is because of the economies of scale. Airlines typically, if they do work on their engines, they typically only do work on the engines that they fly. They're not going to do work on engines that are not even in their fleet. So they may have 4 or 5 engines that they work on. Similarly with the OE, GE is not going to do development work on a Rolls-Royce engine, right? So they're limited to the engines that they design and develop, which is just a handful. StandardAero , on the other hand, we are authorized on 40 different engine platforms. So that gives us the benefit of economies of scale, faster turn times. We're a tough competitor.

So how do you think of, say, Delta TechOps, Lufthansa Technik, Air France. I mean they have large MRO operations. They even have premier positions on fleet. How do they differ as a competitor from you as an independent...

Yes. So I think there's degrees of the extent to which an airline shop is out there in a third-party market. So I won't rank them in order, but different airline shops exist on one extreme as a cost center for the airline and perhaps on the other extreme is actually servicing third-party customers besides their parent company. But airline shops generally are there to reduce the CASM for their parent airline and allow the parent airline to have some control of the dispatch reliability of their fleet, right? So they can get point people from point A to point B and there. So that's why airline maintenance shops exist and there are just kind of different degrees to which they're out there competing with us. They're mostly focused on their parent airline.

Well, we're in a situation today where demand for the aftermarket is very, very large. You described the growth opportunities, but people want to see cash. And this year, we haven't seen any. I know you raised your guide for the year at Q3. Can you tell us how we should start thinking about first, how this year finishes and how should we think about cash going forward?

Yes, sure. So yes, we raised guidance in the third quarter free cash flow. It's a timing issue with some supply chain issues that were going on. We see the reason why we felt confident 6 weeks into the fourth quarter to raise our guidance when we did earnings was because we're starting to see the engine shift, the parts arriving. And so we can kind of like back into what we think is happening on the free cash flow front. This morning, we -- obviously, our Board authorized a $450 million repurchase. Again, this is based upon -- if you look at our guidance for the midpoint, it would imply that we're going to exit the year at about 2.5x leverage with 2 to 3 being our ideal range. And then when you look at our internal forecast for free cash flow is what really drove the size of that $450 million repurchase authorization. We feel quite comfortable with that amount without having to dip into any sort of leverage or anything like that. So we look at this business as an 80% to 100% free cash flow generating business. And the reason why we say 80% is because we always have growth opportunities to invest, whether it's M&A, whether it's organic, whether it's expansions. We tend to be very focused on ROIC and IRR when we're making these investment decisions. The repurchase is just another capital deployment tool in the toolbox. It would go under the same kind of lens as an M&A deal or any other investment that we do. But 80% to 100% is kind of how we kind of view the free cash flow generation. Now obviously, we're ramping up LEAP in 56 Dallas as we go through '26 and '27. So really, you're probably looking at '28 or beyond when you start getting into that 80% to 100% free cash flow.

And at that time, we should think of your free cash flow more tracking with EBITDA...

That's right. That's correct. Yes, it should be growing along those lines.

Part of what's going on here is just timing of when we happen to go public versus the investment cycle. So about 2 years ago, we had the opportunity to make some very important investments, specifically on the LEAP program, on the CF34 program, on the CFM56 program. We chose to make those investments because they're generating -- these are going to create a 30-year revenue stream for us. And you don't get a chance, these opportunities don't come along all the time. It may be years before we have something like that present itself. So when it does, you have to be able to make that investment to capture that opportunity because of the long-term revenue stream that comes with it. Now unfortunately, then a year later, we entered the IPO process. And so coming out of the IPO process, the first year just happens to be on the backside of a couple of years of heavy investment. And so we -- in our guidance, told people that the cash flow was going to be back-end loaded towards the back of this year. And that's exactly what's happening. So as we kind of wind up that heavy investment cycle and then we move into next year, a more normal year, you'll see the underlying cash flow generation from the company. So we're not concerned because we have a view of the company's cash flow for more than just a 12-month period. We're not looking at the company through a straw. We're looking at the company over a much wider range, and we see what the cash flow is going to be like. And we don't limit ourselves for -- we have the bandwidth, we have the balance sheet capacity to make these big investments. And when we have the opportunity, then we're going to do that, and then we're going to keep people advised as to what that means to cash flow.

So if we think of the whole sort of StandardAero story now, I mean the market is all moving in the right direction, but I think of one thing out there that is a risk, and the risk is the availability of parts.

Yes.

Can you comment on that and how -- sort of where we are in getting through any supply chain issues that can constrain your growth?

Yes, you correctly identified one of the risks. And so as we think about the business holistically, where we're at today, where we're going to be over the next 10 years, we have the facilities needed to satisfy our long-range plan. We've got the test cells. We've got the assembly facilities. We've got the tooling. So facilities, not a concern. We have the workforce that we need, and we have the ability to recruit additional and train additional people as we need. We have our own StandardAero University that has 11 full-time instructors that we can generate our own people in addition to working with some of the local colleges and universities that we do. So people are not the constraint. We have the balance sheet capacity and leverage to be able to make additional investments as needed. None of those things are an issue. So if you think about the kind of the 3Ms that you worry about, which is manpower, machines and material, it's really just the material that presents some risk. Now here's what we're doing about that. First of all, you have to understand that supply constraints are not new to the aerospace industry. In the 45 years I've been in the aerospace industry, the number of times that supply of certain parts has not been a problem so far as 0 in 45 years. Supply is always going to be an issue in the aerospace industry. And it's not because people just don't build parts. It's because specifically when you're talking about supply of parts that go into an aerospace engine, these are very unique materials. They're super nickel alloys. They are not materials that are used for anything else on the planet because they have to operate at 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. You're not going to find them in cell phones and water bottles and pencils and pens. So there's a very limited supply of this kind of material because of the unique aspect. So there's always pressure on the supply chain. Now from time to time, you have situations like the pandemic that may create additional stress on the supply chain. So what StandardAero has done is we have developed 2 workarounds or 2, I would say, detours around the roadblocks on the highway that may appear from time to time. And the first is we have invested heavily in growing our component repair business. This business a few years ago was less than $100 million. Today, it's approaching $0.75 billion. If we took that division and carved it out and spun it off as a separate company, it'd be one of the largest component repair businesses on the planet. And that component repair capability gives us the ability to take parts out of used engines and restore them to flightworthy new condition. And if there is a constrained part like blades or shafts, many times, we can find used serviceable material and restore it to flight status and therefore, not have to wait for a new part. So investing in repair development is one of the aspects that we put in place to give us an alternative to waiting for these constrained parts. The second thing we've done is we've created an asset management part of our business. We did an acquisition for a company that did this quite well, and we've now inculcated that into the core business. And we actively go out and source used serviceable material or USM. And when we can find engines and material that are available to purchase and be restored, then we do that. And then we put it in our CRS division and restore these things supply. So repair, development, USM, those are 2 detours that we have invested heavily in that give us the ability to drive around [indiscernible] gives us the ability to drive around some of these supply constraints for certain parts. And it's not everything in the aerospace industry that's constrained. Don't let people lead and believe that. It's really only a handful, a couple of part groupings that tend to be the constrained parts, and it's because those particular parts generally are sole sourced to one supplier or to 2 suppliers. And so those are the ones you really have to worry about, and that's why repair development on some of those parts and USM are very effective ways for us to continue to work around those constraints.

Well, we're out of time, but I want to thank all 3 of you for joining us. This has been great.

Thank you.

Thanks, Doug.