Earnings call transcript: FTAI Aviation Q4 2024 misses EPS, stock rises

FTAI Aviation Ltd reported its Q4 2024 earnings with an EPS of $0.84, falling short of the forecasted $0.88. The revenue also missed expectations, coming in at $498.82 million compared to the anticipated $509.53 million. According to InvestingPro data, the company’s impressive revenue growth of 48.17% over the last twelve months showcases strong operational momentum, despite trading above its Fair Value. The stock rose by 5.54% in after-hours trading, closing at $140.32, with a premarket price increase to $141.

Key Takeaways

• FTAI Aviation’s Q4 EPS and revenue fell short of forecasts.
• Stock price increased by 5.54% post-earnings announcement.
• Adjusted EBITDA rose by 55% year-over-year.
• Strategic initiatives include a new joint venture in Rome and a focus on PMA development.
• The company aims for a $1.4 billion EBITDA by 2026.

Company Performance

FTAI Aviation demonstrated strong performance in Q4 2024, with a 55% year-over-year increase in adjusted EBITDA, reaching $252 million. The company’s full-year adjusted EBITDA grew by 44% to $862.1 million. InvestingPro analysis reveals a robust financial health score of 2.66 (GOOD), with a strong current ratio of 3.53 indicating excellent liquidity. This performance is supported by robust growth in the Aerospace Products segment, which saw a 115% year-over-year increase in EBITDA.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: $498.82 million (missed forecast of $509.53 million)
• Earnings per share: $0.84 (missed forecast of $0.88)
• Leasing segment EBITDA: $134 million in Q4
• Aerospace Products segment EBITDA: $117.3 million in Q4 (↑15% Q/Q, ↑115% Y/Y)

Earnings vs. Forecast

FTAI Aviation reported an EPS of $0.84, below the forecasted $0.88, marking a 4.5% miss. Revenue also fell short by approximately 2.1%. Despite these misses, the company’s growth in adjusted EBITDA and strategic initiatives may have contributed to positive investor sentiment.

Market Reaction

The stock price of FTAI Aviation rose by 5.54% in after-hours trading, closing at $140.32. In premarket trading, the stock further increased to $141, indicating positive investor sentiment despite the earnings miss. InvestingPro data shows an exceptional one-year return of 151.16%, with the stock demonstrating high volatility. This movement contrasts with the company’s 52-week high of $181.64 and low of $54.84, suggesting a strong recovery. For deeper insights into FTAI’s valuation and growth prospects, investors can access the comprehensive Pro Research Report, available exclusively to InvestingPro subscribers.

Outlook & Guidance

FTAI Aviation projects its 2025 business segment EBITDA to be between $1.1 billion and $1.15 billion, with an adjusted free cash flow target of $650 million. With a market capitalization of $14.39 billion and analysts forecasting continued sales growth, the company continues to focus on expanding its market share and optimizing its maintenance strategies, with a long-term EBITDA goal of $1.4 billion by 2026.

Executive Commentary

CEO Joe Adams highlighted the company’s unique maintenance strategy, stating, "We’re the only party that combines all those activities." He also emphasized the company’s future prospects, saying, "We see a bright future ahead in our unique role in the aftermarket."

Risks and Challenges

• Potential impact of import tariffs on cost structure.
• Market saturation in the aviation maintenance sector.
• Macroeconomic pressures affecting global aviation demand.
• Dependence on the durability of NG and A320ceo platforms.
• Challenges in achieving targeted market penetration.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts inquired about the competitive advantages of FTAI Aviation’s maintenance model and the structure of its Strategic Capital Initiative. The company addressed concerns about import tariffs and detailed its green time optimization strategy, reinforcing its commitment to market expansion and operational efficiency.

Full transcript - FTAI Aviation Ltd (FTAI) Q4 2024:

Towanda, Conference Call Operator: Hello, and welcome to FTA Aviation Fourth Quarter twenty twenty four Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speakers’ presentation, there will be a question and answer To ask a question during the session, you will need to press 11 on your telephone. You would then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press 11 again.

I would now like to turn the conference over to Alan Andrini, Head of Investor Relations. You may begin.

Alan Andrini, Head of Investor Relations, FTI Aviation: Thank you, Towanda. I would like to welcome you all to the Epsai Aviation fourth quarter and full year twenty twenty four earnings call. Joining me here today are Joe Adams, our Chief Executive Officer Angela Nam, our Chief Financial Officer and David Marino, our Chief Operating Officer. We have posted an investor presentation and our press release on our Web site, which we encourage you to download if you have not already done so. Also, please note that this call is open to the public in listen only mode and is being webcast.

In addition, we will be discussing some non GAAP financial measures during the call today, including EBITDA. The reconciliation of those measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in the earnings supplement. Before I turn the call over to Joe, I would like to point out that certain statements made today will be forward looking statements, including regarding future earnings. These statements by their nature are uncertain and may differ materially from actual results. We encourage you to review the disclaimers in our press release and investor presentation regarding non GAAP financial measures and forward looking statements and to review the risk factors contained in our quarterly report filed with the SEC.

Now, I would like to turn the call over to Joe.

Joe Adams, Chief Executive Officer, FTI Aviation: Thank you, Alan. I’m pleased today to announce our thirty ninth dividend as a public company and our fifty fourth consecutive dividend since inception. The dividend of $0.3 per share will be paid on March 24 based on a shareholder record date of March 14. I’d also like to start today by talking about the investor presentation posted to our website. While not going to go slide by slide, we wanted to speak to our market opportunity, the value proposition, scalability and durability of our Aerospace Products business.

Starting with the market opportunity, if you look at the total number of operators, the majority of our target customers are small and medium sized airlines, which have narrow body fleets powered by CFM56 and V2500 engines, our focus engines. They represent approximately 600 operators worldwide and 80 of the number of all these engines flown, which creates a large and fragmented addressable market of $22,000,000,000 of annual maintenance spend, where FTI focuses and can provide significant value to the customer. We offer these customers a lower fixed price with minimal downtime product compared to what our competitors do. This is made possible through our unique maintenance capabilities and expertise and a large owned engine fleet. Central to our maintenance approach is green time optimization, which is how we rebuild modules and engines that require repair.

Unlike traditional MROs, FTI leverages in house engineering and maintenance capabilities to extract every available cycle from each module. Our scale enables us to optimize module deployment or combine modules to build right sized engines for our customers. You can see a typical example that we detailed on Slide 13 in

: the

Joe Adams, Chief Executive Officer, FTI Aviation: presentation. But let me take a moment now to explain the process in a little more detail. The CFM56 engine consists of three modules: the fan, the core and the low pressure turbine or otherwise called the LPT. Engine maintenance is needed when one of these modules hits their life limit. When this occurs, usually the other two modules still have remaining life.

And the key to our green time optimization strategy is to acquire and dismantle unserviceable engines, refurbish the viable modules and sell them individually or reassemble them into right sized engines for customers. And a right sized engine is one where the various modules, three modules, all have a similar remaining useful life. Performing module maintenance at scale, in addition to owning the engine throughout the repair cycle, creates significant cost savings opportunities. This allows us to offer significant benefits to customers compared to a traditional shop visit, while also generating higher margins than typical MROs. We see a bright future ahead in our unique role in the aftermarket supported by significant investments we made in 2024 as well as the announcements we made yesterday regarding the new facility maintenance facility in Rome and our strategic capital initiative, which we call SCI, to accelerate our market share and help sustainably support airlines in their long term maintenance needs.

Our new joint venture agreement with IAG Engine Centre Europe, which will be rebranded as Quick Turn Europe, complements our existing facilities in Montreal and Miami and will help address the strong demand for EFTAI’s MRE or maintenance, repair and exchange services from our global customer base in a critical geographic location. Secondly, we were excited to announce yesterday that the SCI has received $2,500,000,000 commitment for asset level debt financing from Atlas (NYSE:ATCO), which is a majority owned subsidiary of Apollo and Deutsche Bank (ETR:DBKGn). The SCI team is currently in the late stages of closing a second round of equity financing. And we believe the market opportunity to deploy capital raise in these SPVs in this way is in the region of more than $4,000,000,000 annually. Turning now to adjusted free cash flow, in 2024, we generated approximately $670,000,000 from business operations, which included $140,000,000 related to the sale of both of our offshore vessels.

At the same time, we invested approximately $1,300,000,000 in major growth initiatives, which range from the purchase of the Montreal maintenance facility, the termination of the management agreement with Fortress and investments in aviation assets, in particular engines and parts, to support our growth strategy in 2025 and beyond. Overall, we feel more confident in our annual business segment EBITDA for 2025 to be between $1,100,000,000 and $1,150,000,000 excluding corporate and other. We’re also expecting adjusted free cash flow of approximately $650,000,000 in 2025, which is broken out in more detail on Slide 24. We will continue to make strategic reinvestments in the business. However, the launch of our strategic capital initiative will reduce our capital asset acquisition needs in 2025 and beyond.

So while we will continue to prioritize growth opportunities, we will also consider capital redistribution to shareholders. Finally, as we look at our current pipeline, we now expect our annual Aviation EBITDA to rise from our previously projected $1,250,000,000 to be approximately now $1,400,000,000 in 2026. With that, I’ll hand it over to Angela to talk through the numbers in more detail.

Angela Nam, Chief Financial Officer, FTI Aviation: Thanks, Joan. The key metric for us is adjusted EBITDA. We ended the year strongly with adjusted EBITDA of $252,000,000 in Q4 twenty twenty four, which is up 9% compared to $232,000,000 dollars in Q3 twenty twenty four and up 55% compared to $162,300,000 in Q4 twenty twenty three. During the fourth quarter, the $252,000,000 EBITDA number was comprised of $133,900,000 from our Leasing segment, $117,300,000 from our Aerospace Products segment and $800,000 from Corporate and Other, which included $18,700,000 related to the gain on sale of both of

: our offshore

Angela Nam, Chief Financial Officer, FTI Aviation: vessels. Now let’s look at all of 2024 versus all of 2023. Adjusted EBITDA was $862,100,000 in 2024, which is up 44% versus $597,300,000 in 2023. Turning now to leasing. Aviation Leasing continued to deliver strong results, posting approximately $134,000,000 of adjusted EBITDA.

The pure leasing component of the $134,000,000 came in at $128,000,000 for Q4 versus $99,000,000 in Q4 twenty twenty three. Included in the $128,000,000 was a $11,000,000 settlement related to Russian assets written off in 2022. Additionally, we ended the year with a $40,400,000 book value of assets sold or 12% margin for a gain of $5,700,000 Overall, we generated $500,000,000 of adjusted EBITDA for 2024 in Aviation Leasing in alignment with our original estimates for the year. Looking ahead, we remain comfortable assuming leasing adjusted EBITDA to remain at $500,000,000 in 2025 as we pivot our focus towards an asset light business model. Aerospace products had yet another excellent quarter with $117,300,000 of adjusted EBITDA at an overall EBITDA margin of 34%, which is up 15% compared to $101,800,000 in Q3 of this year and up 115% compared to $54,600,000 in Q4 twenty twenty three.

We continue to see tremendous growth in our adoption and the usage of our aerospace products and remain focused on ramping up production in both of our facilities in Montreal and Miami as well as commencing operations in Rome. In 2025, we expect to generate $600,000,000 to $650,000,000 of EBITDA, up from $381,000,000 in 2024 and $160,000,000 generated in 2023. With that, let me turn the call back over to Alan.

Alan Andrini, Head of Investor Relations, FTI Aviation: Thank you, Angela. Towanda, you may now open the call to Q and A.

Towanda, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Our first question comes from the line of Christine Louwag with Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS). Your line is open.

Christine Louwag, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Hey, good morning, everyone.

Joe Adams, Chief Executive Officer, FTI Aviation: Good morning.

Christine Louwag, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Joe, by the way, this investor presentation that you put out is very interesting. And it clearly lays out the value proposition that the F Type business model provides. But just taking a step back, when you look at the competitive landscape, one of the key investor questions had been like why isn’t anybody else doing this? Right. I thought you had a pretty good layout of where others are like third party MRO, internal airlines, other aircraft leasing companies.

But why is it that nobody else has this vertically integrated model? Because it really seems like you found a sweet spot. So why aren’t others doing it? What’s their hurdle? And what do you think your true competitive modes are?

Joe Adams, Chief Executive Officer, FTI Aviation: Sure. There’s a lot of different moats we’ve maybe put in place over the years. It’s taken us seven, eight years to get to this point. So it’s not a simple process. It was a sequential number of steps that we took.

But basically to compete to do what we do is similar to what United, American and Delta do, which is you have to own a large fleet of the same type of engine and then have your own maintenance capability and facilities. And so there’s nothing to stop other people from doing that. But what we did is we sort of copied the majors and then offered that to the 600 operators around the world that don’t have a maintenance facility. So it’s effectively it’s an outsourcing function for a single engine type. So when you look around the world like, well, who could do that?

Well, clearly people that own maintenance facilities could do that. But oftentimes, they have multiple engines and they don’t own the engine. They’re servicing other people’s engines. So they have to reorganize their business, set up an asset management team, pick an engine, find a facility that doesn’t have third party work that they have to displace and then try to assemble all the other parts. The other impediment, if you go back where we started is we invested in PMAs six, seven years ago.

And that will be the only PMA product for this engine. So we have an exclusive on that. And many of the companies that I just mentioned that own maintenance facilities have very strong ties with OEMs, which will commercially likely prohibit them from using PMA to any significant degree. So that advantage is something that nobody can copy. The other advantage is that we built up people could, but it takes a lot of time and a focus.

And when we did it, the outcome wasn’t all that clear. I mean, it seems today clear, but when we went down that path and decided not to diversify and own our own maintenance facilities, nobody else is doing it. So we were like people are looking at us like, what are you doing? So I don’t know. That’s we think about it all the time.

We’re always paranoid. And we keep putting up other barriers. And I actually think that FCI is yet another barrier because now we’ve added institutional quality asset management to the mix, which that’s a hard that’s a big hurdle for people to you can’t just go raise a first fund easily. I know because we’ve done it a couple of times. It takes a lot of work.

And so if you put that on top of it, it’s we’re going to try to add something every year to make it harder, frankly.

Christine Louwag, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: That’s really helpful, Joe. And maybe a segue to SDI. I mean, your recent announcement, you’re putting in $550,000,000 in the form of 46 on lease aircraft and you’ve got the $2,500,000,000 in capital from Apollo to Deutsche Bank. And Deutsche Bank, you’re not at $3,000,000,000 and you’re now calling for $4,000,000,000 I mean, what’s driving the increase of the previous $3,000,000,000 What’s the appetite for further capital into your SDI? And lastly, what would you define as successful for you and your partners for this investment?

Joe Adams, Chief Executive Officer, FTI Aviation: Sure. So just on terms of the size, we originally indicated we were targeting $3,000,000,000 and we found that the terms of the debt that we were able to obtain allowed for higher leverage effectively close over 70%. So that gives us more capital to invest. And at the same time, we’re seeing a very strong deal flow. It’s now still February and we have over $1,000,000,000 committed in investments already for SCI.

So and there’s it’s a huge market opportunity. If you look at just the leasing market itself, lessors owned, if you think there’s 14,000 CFM seven thirty seven NGs and A320COs. About half of those are owned by lessors, so 7,000. And roughly 20% of those trade in a given year. There’s been a little bit less because people held on longer due to the pandemic and the strong market environment.

But we see that ramping up as new deliveries start to pick up and lessors need to manage their average age of their fleet. So they have to sell older assets and buy newer assets. So we think that just the lessor market alone is north of $20,000,000,000 a year of investable assets. And then on top of that, you have airlines doing sale leasebacks. And we’ve seen a number of airlines opting for sale leasebacks because they have a lot of shop visits on engines coming up.

And that is a perfect fit for us because we love shop visits. We’re one of one in that category. There’s no one else that I’ve ever met that likes a shop visit. So we are very competitive on sale leasebacks when airlines are looking to phase out ultimately phase out the fleet, but also avoid engine shop visits. So we’ve got a number of deals lined up in that area.

So we really think that there isn’t sort of a dominant lessor in the this asset class, which happens to be the largest by count in the world. And we our goal is to become that. Now what the investor wants ultimately is returns. And because we can manage engine exchanges more efficiently, we actually believe we can deliver a higher return and a lower risk. And it’s what I always think about the investment business, that’s the quadrant you’re always trying to get to.

And we have a product that no one else can offer that we believe generates higher returns and has lower risk for the investors. So there’s really nothing not to like about it.

Angela Nam, Chief Financial Officer, FTI Aviation: Great. Thank you, Joe. I’ll leave it

Christine Louwag, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: at that and these are really helpful.

Towanda, Conference Call Operator: Thanks. Thank you. Please standby for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Sheila Kahyaoglu with Jefferies. Your line is open.

: Good morning and thank you team. Congrats on the

: great quarter. Joe, maybe two questions for you both on margins. First, if we could start off with your margins at 35%, if you could go through that a bit, because I think there’s some misunderstanding on how you generate those margins and how sustainable they are. And then secondly, it seems like you’ve upped the bar once again with Slide 14 and you’re talking about 35% to 50% margin potential EBITDA margins versus the 40% you’ve talked about previously. Can you walk us through the profit drivers over the course of $2,025,000,000 dollars and beyond whether it’s PMA adding two fifty million dollars green time optimization and just better productivity at your facilities as well?

So if you could just touch on those two things.

Joe Adams, Chief Executive Officer, FTI Aviation: Yes, sure. So when we think about the margins, we break it down into really four different categories and many of which are additive to one another. But you start with repair. When a typical MRO gets paid to fix something for someone and generally they’re earning 15% margin for repair work. It’s like a mechanic.

You pay the labor and you pay the parts. That’s sort of the easy part. The second is green time optimization, which we’ve given an example in the slide deck and David will walk through that in more detail. But that’s something unique to us that no one else does. And as I mentioned, it’s really it’s been practiced by major airlines.

But if you have to own your fleet and have a maintenance facility and we combine that to so that we don’t waste any available cycles hours and cycles. The third is a part strategy, which is use serviceable material, buying used LLPs and ultimately PMA, which is the top of the mountain. And we have all of those going. We’ve been working on our parts strategy for many years, and we have a whole team of people, and that’s all they do because a big part of any shop visit is parts. So and ultimately, we’re moving more into piece part repair, which will be further upside on margins as we do more and more of our own repairs.

And then lastly, in many cases, we provide a just in time product for the airline and we help them avoid inducting that engine into a shop. We can do field service work. So we have a white glove just in time product. So when you break the margin down that way, none of those components seem out of line. We’re the only party that combines all those activities though.

And then when you think about the sustainability, we believe that this is sustainable in any market environment. The repair and the white glove service are value adds no matter what the economic climate is. And then numbers two and three, green time optimization in parts, we believe will grow. And the optimizations model, we have a little chart in there. The more engines and the more modules you own, the better you get at optimization.

It’s just mathematical. So we believe there’s further upside in the optimization. You also mentioned the efficiency of your facility that we believe we can, by standardizing the approach to engines having mechanics only working on one engine, running it like a factory, we’ve been able to demonstrate productivity improvements so we can drive that to higher margins. And then lastly is PMA, which is not really in the numbers, but we believe that adds five to 10 percentage points to the margins when the full complement of PMA is available. It’ll be somewhat a function of product mix, but we think five to 10 percentage points of upside is a reasonable number.

: David will walk through

David Marino, Chief Operating Officer, FTI Aviation: the green time optimization. Hi, Sheila. Happy to walk everyone through Page 13 of the presentation. So this example is meant to bring to life FTI’s secret sauce, which is Green Time Optimization. So our business is built to monetize every cycle in the engine through maintenance.

So generally, the starting point is a group of unserviceable engines. So on the left, you’ll see three engines that have become unserviceable. In this scenario, the engines are unserviceable because one of its modules has run out of life. These engines are either sourced through exchanging or leasing books or we can acquire them unserviceable as well. In this example, the acquisition cost of these three engines is $6,500,000 Next (LON:NXT), the engines are then broken down into separate modules.

So just to recap, each engine is three modules, so it’s a total of nine modules. Maintenance is performed to address durability issues and ensure each of the modules can last until its limiter. In this scenario, we are investing $3,500,000 to bring the total investment to these engines to $10,000,000 Finally, on the right, you create you assemble the modules to create two serviceable engines with consistent life across each of its modules. And in this scenario, the third engine is not actually assembled. It’s an engine for teardown that we can reuse for future builds via its parts.

In total, the total value of these engines is now $16,000,000 So effectively, we created $6,000,000 of additional value. So this example demonstrates the power of Green Time optimization, where one plus one is a lot more than two. And as the business continues to grow, the ability to optimize Green Time only increases. Our strategic capital initiative will further enhance our ability to optimize green time because we’ll have a committed backlog and we’ll be in higher volumes. And with insight on what that backlog looks like, we’ll be more efficient into actually producing modules and engines more effectively.

Effectively.

: And I

David Marino, Chief Operating Officer, FTI Aviation: think we also illustrate on Page 15 that exponential growth that Joe was talking about, which ties into scale in the business.

: Great. Thank you so much.

: Thanks.

Towanda, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Josh Sullivan with The Benchmark Company. Your line is open.

Josh Sullivan, Analyst, The Benchmark Company: Good morning.

Joe Adams, Chief Executive Officer, FTI Aviation: Good morning.

Josh Sullivan, Analyst, The Benchmark Company: Can we just dig into the new quick turn Center Europe? Why was this the right joint venture in Rome? How should we think of the ramp? Maybe what percentage of your customers are already in Europe and what having a local facility might do for turnaround times or politics or even new capabilities for Rafti?

David Marino, Chief Operating Officer, FTI Aviation: Sure. This is David. I’ll take that question. So we’re very excited to add Rome to our MRE network. And we’re very excited because as you pointed out, the first focus is geography.

So about 40% of our customers today are in Europe as well as Rome has great connectivity to The Middle East and this specific facility actually has the Chinese certification, which then gives us access into China. The second reason is its capabilities. So this facility has a lot of the similar capabilities to our Miami facility, where it is focused on CFM56. It has MRE maintenance capability as well as it has access to a test cell. So our plan is to reactivate that test cell in the next two years and bring that test cell online.

Where it differs from the Miami facility that also has access to piece part repair, like all our maintenance facilities, they all have a deep history. This one in particular has a history with an airline, Alitalia. It has had investments with Fotanza, which at one point had a partnership. So they developed a lot of capabilities, and that facility has been underutilized. So we’re very excited to bring our volume to that facility and grow that.

We believe we can start the MRE process immediately after acquisition and then we can ramp up for the test cell and the piece power capability over time.

Josh Sullivan, Analyst, The Benchmark Company: Got it. Thank you for that. And then just as a second question, I’m going to touch the load stone here and just ask for if there’s any updates on the PMA approvals, but also maybe how has the PMA part approved late last year performed? Are lessors using that part or is there any resistance?

Joe Adams, Chief Executive Officer, FTI Aviation: Yes. I’ll take the second part first. The part approved last year is being installed in engines. And the prior part, which has been in service now over two years, has flown almost one hundred thousand hours in our engines and is performing extremely well. And ultimately, I mean, that’s what matters for PMA is that the part is high quality and durable and lasts a long time.

And that’s what operators are that’s what we’re seeing and that’s what operators are experiencing. So that’s great news. In terms of the approval, again, we don’t forecast when actual part numbers will be issued. We did say that there’s been a substantial amount of progress made and we’re very close on the next part. But that’s pretty much the same thing we said the last time, but it still stands to be true.

Josh Sullivan, Analyst, The Benchmark Company: Thank you for the time. Yes.

Towanda, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Giuliano Volagno with Compass Point. Your line is open.

Alan Andrini, Head of Investor Relations, FTI Aviation0: Good morning. Congratulations on another great quarter and the continued execution fundamentally and also expanding the runway for the business.

Towanda, Conference Call Operator: One of

Alan Andrini, Head of Investor Relations, FTI Aviation0: the questions I was curious about asking you was a bit more of a macro question in terms of the evolution of the industry, but as a lot of the legacy operators come out of their midlife legacy assets, what do you think the impact will be on the industry? And will the industry become more fractured and fragmented as some of the larger legacy operators start to sell off some of those assets to smaller operators and mid sized operators globally. And I’m curious how that impacts you in the MRE business and it creates more opportunities over time for you to expand the MRE platform and even the SEI platform as well.

Joe Adams, Chief Executive Officer, FTI Aviation: Yes. No, that’s a great question. And it is an important dynamic in the evolution of that aircraft in that today you have probably about 20% of the engines are operated by those large very large carriers that have maintenance facilities and are harder for us to get at because they don’t outsource that function the way the others do. But over time, all of those aircraft are going to come out of those fleets and they’re going to or not all of them, but almost all. And they will go into small and medium sized airlines around the world, which will need our services.

So you can think of you probably have a 25% growth opportunity just on that phenomenon coming out of having those airplanes cascade down into second third tier operators, cargo operators, charter airlines all around the world. So that’s a very important industry dynamic, which has happened in every other aircraft platform. The other thing is if you look at the macro on the industry spend, Aviation Week just put out new numbers on expected total spend on maintenance for V2500 and CFM56 engines remaining relatively constant at $22,000,000,000 through 02/1930. And so you’ve got another five years where they’re forecasting this maintenance spend, which is our addressable market, is going to be relatively constant for those engines. And as we said, we’re at 5% of that right now.

And so we don’t see any reason why we couldn’t increase that market penetration to 20%, twenty five % over time.

Alan Andrini, Head of Investor Relations, FTI Aviation0: That’s very helpful. And maybe a slight follow-up on that question, but I’d be curious when you think about that opportunity. Obviously, there’s a lot of midlife aircrafts that need to transact. And I’m curious now that you’re scaling out the SEI programs, does that give you a very good opportunity to kind of intercept those assets that would normally maybe be sold to mid tier operators and then maybe try to capture them and acquire them into the SEI vehicles and lease them out to the mid tier operators and then recapture all the maintenance. I’m curious if there’s an opportunity for you to kind of intercept that cycle that typically happens and also become the lessor and the maintenance provider as part of that conversion cycle?

David Marino, Chief Operating Officer, FTI Aviation: Yes. And the answer to that is yes. And I think that’s only accelerated through the strategic capital initiative where we’re well capitalized and we’re a fantastic buyer of these assets. Now we can do the entire service, which is we can own the aircraft via this strategic capital initiative. We can offer leasing and then we can do the maintenance.

So it’s the entire program. So that really does accelerate our ability to penetrate aircraft more rapidly.

Joe Adams, Chief Executive Officer, FTI Aviation: And the other I mean, the other important dynamic is from the eyes of the customer, which is

Josh Sullivan, Analyst, The Benchmark Company: the

Joe Adams, Chief Executive Officer, FTI Aviation: airline, they don’t see any difference between FTI Aviation and SCI. We are managing the entire relationship. And so from their point of view, that’s where they’re dealing with FTI and they’re going to do as many of them said, they’re going to do more engine business with us because we’re also doing we’re becoming one of their biggest owners of their fleet.

Alan Andrini, Head of Investor Relations, FTI Aviation0: That’s very helpful. Congratulations on all the success raising the vehicles and making everything happen quickly. I’ll jump back in the queue and move on from there. Thank you so much. Thanks.

Towanda, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Brandon Oglenski with Barclays (LON:BARC). Your line is open.

: Hi, good morning, Joe and team and congrats on all the developments and obviously surviving the recent volatility here, so onwards and upwards. Thank you. John, I wondered if you could talk appreciate it. John, I wonder if you could talk to your customer base, the airlines and how they’re thinking about the NGs and the A320 prior generation family, because I think you just quoted something from Aviation Week that the expectation is that the maintenance is going to remain flat for the next five years. But just given how long it’s taken Boeing (NYSE:BA) to get back up and running, is this going to be a platform that runs longer than people think?

Joe Adams, Chief Executive Officer, FTI Aviation: That’s our bet, yes. And it’s the two points you mentioned, there’s the lack of new deliveries. There’s a hole in people’s expected growth from that. That means they’re going to hold on to these current generation assets longer. And then secondly, there’s still durability issues on the new technology that are causing higher operating costs in the industry and a requirement in some cases where airlines have to have more aircraft of the new type to fly the same schedule as the old type because they the engine is coming off wing earlier than they expected.

So those are dynamics that I don’t think are going to change anytime soon. So David can speak to the operators, but we think they’re going to hold on.

David Marino, Chief Operating Officer, FTI Aviation: Yes. We’re seeing a lot of airlines extend, let’s say, five to eight years. So we’re seeing that longevity of this platform go further and further. As Joe mentioned, the 737NG and A320ceos are just a very durable product. So you know exactly what the costs are going to be.

It’s very predictable. So a lot of airlines are holding on to these aircraft as long as possible.

: Appreciate that response. And then can you talk to your customer base during the quarter? I mean, I know you guys are doing, I think, a lot of one off transactions, but how successful have you been getting folks to contract for forward engine events in the future?

David Marino, Chief Operating Officer, FTI Aviation: Yes. So it’s a combination of, let’s say, spot transactions and then we have programs with a lot of large airlines. And these programs we’re seeing as far as, let’s say, three years. So for example, we’ll have an airline come in to say, we want to do fan exchanges for the next three years. So those are effectively contracted in our backlog.

As we mentioned, the strategic capital initiative is going to give us a contractual backlog. So I think that’s also going to give us greater access to the future. And those leases typically are anywhere from two to, let’s say, seven years, with the average duration being around four years. So we’re going to have a four year duration backlog on those leases. And as far as customer acceptance, we’ve again, I think we’ve said this in a few calls, but any every customer who has bought the product, who’s tried the product has come back to buy more.

So it’s as I mentioned, it’s a product that offers cost savings, time savings and it’s a predictable product versus shopping your engine.

: Thank you.

Towanda, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Please standby for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Hilary Cacanando with Deutsche Bank. Your line is open. Check to see if you’re on mute, Hillary.

Hillary, check to see if you’re on mute.

Alan Andrini, Head of Investor Relations, FTI Aviation1: Sorry about that. I was on mute. I guess you could

Christine Louwag, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: hear me now,

Angela Nam, Chief Financial Officer, FTI Aviation: right? So could you go over the structure of

Alan Andrini, Head of Investor Relations, FTI Aviation1: the strategic capital initiative? For example, who owns the assets? Is it the special purpose vehicle? And who ultimately takes the residual value risk of those assets? Is it the LP investor of the special purpose vehicle that takes the residual value risk?

And then if you could just talk about what type of returns the LP investor could expect from investing in those assets in the current market?

Joe Adams, Chief Executive Officer, FTI Aviation: Sure. I can do everything except the last part. But in terms of the structure, just to lay it out sort of simply, if we assume it’s $4,000,000,000 of total capital, approximately 70% of that will be provided by the debt providers that we announced yesterday. So call that $2,800,000,000 Then $1,200,000,000 is the remaining number, which will be equity. And those are called a partnership.

SCI is effectively a partnership. And there will be third party investors for 80% of that capital and FTI Aviation will put up 20% of that capital. So call it $240,000,000 from FTI Aviation. And the owner of that asset is the Partnership and the residual value risk of that asset lies with the partnership. FTA Aviation is the general partner and will manage the partnership, so we’ll make investment decisions and asset management decisions.

And as I mentioned, we’ll manage relationships with the airlines, but the legal owner of it will be the partnership. And we’re not allowed to pay.

Alan Andrini, Head of Investor Relations, FTI Aviation1: Got it. That’s very helpful. The returns? Okay, got you. That makes sense.

And then I guess staying on SDI, I guess you’ll probably get new revenue items tied to SDI. I guess you’ll get management fees and incentive fees as well as earnings from minority interest. Could you just go over like how these fees work? For example, what are the criteria to receive incentive fees? How much are you charging for management fees?

And yes, how they work? Thank you.

Angela Nam, Chief Financial Officer, FTI Aviation: Yes. Sure, Hillary. I’ll take that. So high level, we expect to be a minority LP interest holder in the FCI. So on the balance sheet, you’ll see it presented as one line as our investment.

And then from earnings perspective from the Partnership, we’ll get pro rata equity earnings on the P and L. In addition to that, as you mentioned, we’ll get a management fee for the assets that the Partnership owns as a percentage. And in addition to that, based on hurdle calculation, we’ll also be able to earn incentives.

Alan Andrini, Head of Investor Relations, FTI Aviation1: So like what’s the percentage you’re charging for management fees and like what are do you have to meet some sort of criteria to get incentive fees?

Joe Adams, Chief Executive Officer, FTI Aviation: Yes. But we’re not disclosing the quantum at this point, but I would just say it’s in line with market for this type of investment partnership.

Alan Andrini, Head of Investor Relations, FTI Aviation1: Got it. Okay, great. Thank you very much.

Josh Sullivan, Analyst, The Benchmark Company: Thanks. Thank

Towanda, Conference Call Operator: you. Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Ken Herbert with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Alan Andrini, Head of Investor Relations, FTI Aviation2: Yes. Hi. Good morning, everybody.

: Good morning.

Alan Andrini, Head of Investor Relations, FTI Aviation2: Hey, Joe. Joe, maybe just to start, the Montreal facility was a headwind to margins in the third quarter. Seems like you had some recovery there in the fourth quarter. What are you seeing with some of the legacy third party contracts there? Have they completely rolled off?

And how much of a headwind was that in the fourth quarter? And how do we think about that into 2025?

Joe Adams, Chief Executive Officer, FTI Aviation: Yes, there were still some of it in the fourth quarter. I think it was it sort of impacted the margins by one to two percentage points. So we had, I think, a little under $20,000,000 of legacy business and it was below 10% margin. So it was a drag on margins in the fourth quarter. And as I said, without that, we would have been 35%, thirty six % margins.

It’s the most, if not a lot of that is gone at the December. There still are a couple of tag ins, but it’s probably it’s less of an impact in Q1 and it should be totally gone by the end of Q1.

Alan Andrini, Head of Investor Relations, FTI Aviation2: Okay, perfect. And last quarter you called out sort of the new customer additions. As you think about the sort of 600 fleet operators, can you comment on how many customers maybe you added in the fourth quarter or any assumptions sort of underlying penetration of obviously fleets you’re not working with today from an MRE standpoint?

Joe Adams, Chief Executive Officer, FTI Aviation: Yes, it was we’re not going to do that every quarter. As I said, you can only be a new customer once. That’s my fear of this. It gets harder. But it was double digits in terms of new customer adds.

And we’re now more focused, I think, on market penetration and market share. And looking at that, with a $22,000,000,000 of spend, our revenues are about $1,000,000,000 in 2024. So we’re under 5% and we’re targeting ultimately over a period a much higher market penetration. And so we’re going to be measuring off more off of that on a go forward basis. But there are as you said, there’s 600 operators out there.

People don’t realize how fragmented and virtually every airline in the world owns or operates an A320 or a seven thirty seven. It’s like it’s the core of everyone’s fleet and they’re highly reliable, dependable. They’re great cargo airplanes, so it’s going to there’s going to be a long, long tail on this fleet.

Alan Andrini, Head of Investor Relations, FTI Aviation2: Yes, perfect. I agree. Thank you.

Towanda, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Myles Walton with Wolfe. Your line is open.

Josh Sullivan, Analyst, The Benchmark Company: Thanks. Good morning. Hey Joe, I

Alan Andrini, Head of Investor Relations, FTI Aviation3: just wanted to clarify on the SCI. I think you said that you’re moving on to your second partner in that relationship. And just curious if you can clarify, is the first partner you have currently at a larger equity stake than you are? Just how far you are in closing that, the 80% outside yourselves of the equity partnership?

Joe Adams, Chief Executive Officer, FTI Aviation: Yes. So what it’s not just a partner, it was a first closing that we had at the December. And what I’ve said is that was a substantial amount of the total equity that we’re seeking. It is greater than what we’ve invested what we’re planning to invest. And we are in the process of organizing a second closing, which we expect to occur in the next couple of months.

It’s possible that there may not be a third closing, but we could also have a third closing in probably in the third quarter with some smaller investors to fill out the group. But that’s our plan and where we are in the capital raise on the equity.

Alan Andrini, Head of Investor Relations, FTI Aviation3: Okay, perfect. And then you mentioned $1,000,000,000 of investments that you’re seeing now in one of your remarks. Is that in addition to the $558,000,000 that you’re ceding the portfolio with?

Joe Adams, Chief Executive Officer, FTI Aviation: No, it includes that.

Alan Andrini, Head of Investor Relations, FTI Aviation3: Okay. And I mean the other question I had is and thanks for the color on the cash flow that you’re presenting for 2025. In there is, I guess, replacement CapEx of $310,000,000 And I know that the SCI part of it is to go to a more capital light approach. Is that replacement CapEx something you’d expect on a go forward basis? Or is that more of replacement CapEx relative to the seating of the aircraft you’re putting in?

Joe Adams, Chief Executive Officer, FTI Aviation: Yes, it’s meant to be that replacement. So it’s not a go forward number. And we look at the same thing last year. If you sell to be clear, if you sell $200,000,000 of assets in order to keep the business going, you should buy $200,000,000 of assets. That’s the intellectually honest way to look at that number.

And so we are selling assets from the balance sheet and we would expect to invest some of that money in engines, some of the same types of opportunistic purchases we’ve done historically. We could buy aircraft that have engines that we might scrap the airframe and put the engines in our MRE. So there’s a lot of deals that would not fit into SCI that we would continue to be eligible to do on at FTI Aviation.

Alan Andrini, Head of Investor Relations, FTI Aviation3: Okay. And then last one, if I could. The Slide 13, David, you went through on the green time optimization. It didn’t look like you were adding cycles in that exercise, but the margins were quite high. I’m just curious how often are you not adding cycles and getting that kind of margin return, which is obviously a lot larger than the margins implied on the next slide?

David Marino, Chief Operating Officer, FTI Aviation: Yes. So that was an illustration where we were not adding cycles. We add cycles often. That’s happening via performance restorations that we’ll do on each of its modules. So every asset, every module is unique.

And depending on what the build is, we’re going to be doing different work on it, right? So we are adding cycles and that’s via performance restoration LOP replacements.

Alan Andrini, Head of Investor Relations, FTI Aviation: Okay. Thanks again.

Joe Adams, Chief Executive Officer, FTI Aviation: We’re also doing repairs on those modules to make sure that they last as long as the limiter lasts. So there is work being done on it.

Alan Andrini, Head of Investor Relations, FTI Aviation2: Okay. Thank you.

Towanda, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Stephen Trent (NSE:TREN) with Citi. Your line is open.

: Yes. Thank you, everybody, and good morning to you. I believe that Angela had mentioned earlier that you guys received, I believe, 11 some odd million dollars from insurance claims from your equipment that got stuck in the Russian Federation. Can you refresh my memory sort of where the rest of your outstanding claims stand?

Joe Adams, Chief Executive Officer, FTI Aviation: Yes. Good question and good positive developments on the insurance side. We did receive 11,000,000 in the fourth quarter. We’ve also received over $22,000,000 in this in the first quarter of this year already with one of our major insurers. And insurers are moving to settle now.

And I think it once that starts, it typically accelerates because whoever’s left that doesn’t settle ends up with a big legal bill. So we expect the remaining claims to settle out fairly quickly. We wrote off in total back in 2022 about $88,000,000 in assets that were lost in Russia. I think we’ve recovered $38,000,000 to date and we expect to recover more than the $88,000,000 in total. And it should all be this year, I expect, I hope.

: Okay. That’s great color. I really appreciate that. And just one other, thinking about the industry, I know there’s very little detail at this point, what might happen with import tariffs here and what have you. But I asked one of your competitors a couple of weeks ago, do you think if tariffs do get enacted that it could actually push airlines to do more aircraft and engine leasing rather than direct purchases?

So sort of pushing the tariffs into whatever a few more basis points of our long term leads versus the one time impact of paying a tariff at the point of purchase. Maybe I’m oversimplifying this, but would just love to hear your thoughts. Thank you.

Joe Adams, Chief Executive Officer, FTI Aviation: No. Well, there’s so many theories about what tariffs actually are going to do that that’s one I hadn’t even heard, but that we hope that happens. It’s sort of good if it’s good for leasing, it’s good for us. But it’s really hard to know what impacts are going to hit yet. And aerospace as an industry is going to be effective on new deliveries.

So that to me is more immediate. If it becomes more expensive to buy new aircraft and new parts, we have an advantage there because we’re not buying new.

: That’s super helpful. Thanks so much.

Towanda, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Andre Majerat with BTIG. Your line is open.

Alan Andrini, Head of Investor Relations, FTI Aviation4: Hey, everyone. Good morning and thanks for the question. To address the elephant in the room, I guess, it’s good to see the audit successfully concluded. But looking at the current accounting and the fact that leasing is becoming an increasingly smaller portion of mix, are there any plans to pivot the accounting model to more of a COGS format? I mean, in a way from the way you currently account for the acquisition of leasing equipment?

Any color there, super helpful.

Angela Nam, Chief Financial Officer, FTI Aviation: Yes. I’ll take that, Andre. Yes, I definitely think that the move that we already have started making at the end of twenty twenty four and will continue to make in 2025 as more of our business is shifting over to the industrial manufacturing aerospace products business. So I think that’s absolutely fair. It’s not something that will change overnight.

But as you’ve seen with additional disclosures we’ve added in our filings and color that we’ve added on our cash flow presentation, I do think that that’s something that we are working through diligently and you should see more of operating outflow related to our purchases over the next year.

Joe Adams, Chief Executive Officer, FTI Aviation: Our goal is to convert the whole company to industrial accounting. And hopefully, we can do that once the Aerospace Products business is more than half the EBITDA of the company.

Alan Andrini, Head of Investor Relations, FTI Aviation4: Got it. Got it. Super helpful. And then I guess another one for both of you. I mean, looking at the EBITDA outlook for the coming year, I mean, how do we expect it to play out?

What would the cadence look like? And maybe what are some of the moving pieces that might drive things upward or downward as we go through the balance of the year?

Joe Adams, Chief Executive Officer, FTI Aviation: Well, if you look back over the last, what, two years, it’s I mean, you can kind of use a ruler, but it’s not there’s no we don’t see any change in the cadence.

Alan Andrini, Head of Investor Relations, FTI Aviation4: So the typical seasonality in the first quarter then kind of contributing to a step up through the balance of the next three?

Joe Adams, Chief Executive Officer, FTI Aviation: We haven’t detected any seasonality really in this business. Historically, there’s an argument that airlines tried to avoid doing maintenance in the third quarter of the year and they tried to do it in the first quarter. But we provide something that is an immediate just in time solution. And if an engine if an airline needs an engine in August, we’ll have an engine in August for them. So they don’t have any downtime if they use our product.

So far, we haven’t and obviously, we’ve been on a pretty rapid growth rate. We’re up EBITDA is up 100% year over year. So we don’t see an effect of seasonality in the business at this point.

Alan Andrini, Head of Investor Relations, FTI Aviation4: Got it, Scott.

David Marino, Chief Operating Officer, FTI Aviation: I think we’re more focused on overall production, right? So I think we outlined in 2025 for targets, an average of 100 modules per quarter in the Montreal facility. So we’re extremely focused on ramping up Montreal. We finished the year at Q4 at 75 modules. I think that’s in the earnings supplement.

So that is our focus, right? And as we mentioned, really kind of have three initiatives around ramping up, right? It’s specialization where we have the workforce that touches a specific module, let’s say, an LPT module, they’re going to do that all day every day. So that’s going to bring up a lot of efficiency. The second is standardization, which means that we have a doctrine on work scopes, meaning when when we get modules, we know exactly what to do depending on what we find.

And then number three is we’ve launched since we’ve acquired in September, we’ve launched an incentive program for employees that’s based on quality and production metrics. So for us, we’re strictly we’re very focused on production at that facility as well as Miami. And I think Rome is going to increase the capacity that we have overall in the facility in our MRE network.

Alan Andrini, Head of Investor Relations, FTI Aviation4: Excellent. Awesome. Thanks all for the comments. I’ll jump back in the queue.

Towanda, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, I would now like to turn the call back over to Alan for closing remarks.

Alan Andrini, Head of Investor Relations, FTI Aviation: Thank you, Towanda, and thank you all for participating in today’s conference call. We look forward to updating you after Q1.

Towanda, Conference Call Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.

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