Honeywell at Paris Air Show: Transformative Year Amid Challenges

On Sunday, 15 June 2025, Honeywell International Inc. (NASDAQ:HON) presented at the SIAE Paris Air Show 2025, highlighting a transformative year with strategic initiatives and challenges. CEO Vimal Kapoor emphasized resilience in facing geopolitical uncertainties and tariffs while focusing on growth through acquisitions and spin-offs.

Key Takeaways

• Honeywell is undergoing a significant transformation in 2025, focusing on strategic acquisitions and spin-offs.
• The Aerospace segment is poised for growth, with plans to become a standalone company.
• Continued investment in supply chain and technology aims to double business size by the 2030s.
• The company maintains its 2025 guidance despite external challenges.

Financial Results

• Honeywell expects to maintain its 2025 financial guidance.
• Aerospace’s retrofit mods and upgrades (RMUs) business generated $1.5 billion in revenue in 2024, with double-digit CAGR growth.
• Revenue breakdown for Honeywell Aerospace: 60% commercial and 40% defense.
• Electronic Solutions accounts for 40% of Aerospace revenue, Engines and Power Systems for 30%, and Control Solutions for 30%.

Operational Updates

• Honeywell completed six acquisitions over the past two years, including CASE and Civitanavi for Aerospace.
• A spinoff of Advanced Materials is expected by the end of 2025, with Aerospace following suit.
• Over $1 billion invested in the supply chain has resulted in eleven consecutive quarters of double-digit output growth.
• Future plans include capacity expansion, AI tools, and smart factories.

Future Outlook

• Long-term sales CAGR is expected in the mid to high single-digit range for the aerospace portfolio.
• Continued growth in the international defense market at double-digit rates.
• Strategic focus includes leveraging technology across platforms and addressing trends like autonomy and electrification.

Q&A Highlights

• Vimal Kapoor stated, "This year is definitely a transformative year for Honeywell."
• Jim, Aerospace Leader, emphasized the unique position of Honeywell Aerospace, saying, "We really are a very unique and powerful franchise within the aerospace industry."

For a more detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - SIAE Paris Air Show 2025:

Sean Meakim, Investor Relations Lead, Honeywell: All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the Honeywell Paris Air Show Investor Reception twenty twenty five. Great to have you all here as well as those live on the webcast. I’m Sean Meakim, I lead Investor Relations for Honeywell, and we’re looking forward to having a great discussion with you all today.

So as you all know, we’re likely to make some forward looking statements. The presentation today is available on our IR website for those who are looking to follow along with the presentation on the webcast. And all of our regular disclosures are easily found in a number of locations. So with that, let’s get on with the presentation. So I’d like to welcome up to the stage, Chairman and CEO of Honeywell, Vimal Kapoor.

Vimal?

Vimal Kapoor, Chairman and CEO, Honeywell: So good morning, everyone, and good afternoon. And welcome to Paris Air Show Investor Event. For a 100 year old company like Honeywell, two years is not a long period. But I was just remembering two years back, we did a similar event and I was five days into the job and Jim was not even started. And, you know, in two years, a lot has changed.

Aerospace soon will be a standalone company in a year from now approximately. And I think here we’re going to talk about Honeywell Aerospace story for most part. But before we go there, let’s see how it works. No, wrong way. Just want to mention a few comments about Honeywell and then I’ll hand over to Jim to talk about the aerospace.

So this year is definitely a transformative year for Honeywell. And we essentially focused on what I say three priorities. The is how we deliver twenty twenty five flawlessly. It’s been an interesting year since we started. We started Q1 relatively strong.

The two months of quarter two has gone on expected lines. And we expect the guide to hold our guide as the year progresses in 2025. Now there have been unforeseen events like tariffs came in as the year started, and you can all observing the geopolitical events and that uncertainty certainly plays its own role. But we remain confident that what we have projected, we are going to deliver that on the strength of the business, what we have behind us. So that’s our number one priority.

And most of our business leaders are focused on delivering the year. Then the priority has been that while we are focusing on delivering the year, how we focus on transformation of both Honeywell and Honeywell Aerospace. Both these entities have significant opportunity for portfolio transformation. And as you observe, we made six acquisitions over the last two years. Aerospace did two of them.

And they are very strategic for the aerospace portfolio. It’s not about the size, it’s about the capabilities which the business needed. And adding those capabilities for the Case acquisition and CV Tanavi have been very meaningful. At the same time, acquisitions in Honeywell on LNG business or Access Solutions business or Sundyne and soon to happen JM Catalyst business, they are all to make our business more transformative. So that journey is continuing.

Now we are sensitive that we are going through the spins at this point of time and integration of these acquisitions have to happen. So you can expect us to be a of a pause till we complete the spin work. But fundamentally, continue to work on our pipeline and transformation of portfolio will remain our priority in the times ahead. So that’s our priority. And the last but not the least is making the spins happen for Advanced Materials as well as for Aerospace.

Now Advanced Materials spins, announced last year in October, we are far along the way. We do expect the process to complete by end of the year. There’s a little probability it may spill over to 2026, but there’s a high probability case that it will happen before end of the year. We have announced the CEOs. We announced the management team.

We’ll soon announce the board. So we’re going through the last mile of the process of spinning that business. And at the same time, we started the work for aerospace spin. And fundamentally, how we are running these spins is there is a separate separation management team which is running these two programs. So think about a program manager for advanced materials spins, which gets supported by outside bankers and consulting companies like PWCA and And then there’s a separate program office for separation of Aerospin.

And these are separate set of people who are not running the quarter day to day. So there’s a concern that how we are doing this all simultaneously is that it’s different people. Now the threats get common at my level, and of course, few decisions I have to make. But for the most part, teams are quite independent. We also are sending up the team apart from these two, which is transformation of Honeywell for the future state, because we have to anticipate stranded cost as we get along, and we are not waiting for that event to occur.

So we’re already thinking ahead the transformation of Honeywell has to occur. So all that work is happening in parallel. So a lot going on here, and we feel excited, and we feel committed to meeting all these priorities. So with that, I’m going to get Jim on the stage. As I mentioned, Jim started his role in August of ’twenty three, about two months after I started.

We announced him at the Paris Air Show. And he has been leading the aerospace team in its very difficult circumstances over the last two years because the industry has gone through lots of ups and downs, which you all know. So I’ll get Jim on the stage and let him tell his story. Jim, over to you.

Jim, Aerospace Leader, Honeywell: Thank you, Vimal. It is an absolute pleasure and honor to be up here in front of you today. Talk a little bit about Honeywell Aerospace and what we’ve been doing with the business and what our plans are on a go forward basis. And particularly adventurous to be up here today to be able to talk to you about the backdrop of a couple of announcements that we’re making here at the Air Show. One of them was on the platform for Bell on the V-two 80, part of our defense portfolio, the selection of our auxiliary power unit and our Attune Micro I’m sorry, our Attune compact vapor cycle cooling systems.

The selection from Southwest Airlines to equip their entire fleet with our Smart X runway solutions, provide enhanced safety and feature sets in the cockpit, both from a smart runway and a smart landing. And then also we just recently announced as well, the fact that we’ve taken Leonardo AW139 and have flown it autonomously, time that has ever happened and with our technologies and that of our partners as well. Couple things I would say. Something I would say here a little bit about Honeywell Aerospace and how I would characterize it a little bit. We really are a very unique and powerful franchise within the aerospace industry.

We deliver highly complex systems in the most critical and most valuable portions of the airframe today. And that’s for our manufacturers and our OEMs across a multitude of platforms and aircraft types. thing that I would say is we have an unrivaled diversified portfolio as well as an unrivaled and unmatched install base from which we develop a lot of our technologies in the past and continue to develop for our future. Ultimately, all of this is underpinned by an operating system that is a best in class that allows the team to stay exceptionally focused and to drive profitability, to drive enhancements, and to place us in those most valuable portions of the aircraft. When I think about our heritage for a moment, what most people don’t realize is that our heritage is built on over a hundred years of operating in the aviation sector, delivering the most complicated systems and technologies.

And we’ve been along that journey and have been a part of many firsts and we’ve played a role in most of the major accomplishments on that journey. It started back in 1914 with the invention and creation of the autopilot, followed by the invention and creation and deployment of the auxiliary power units in the 1950s. We’ve been on every NASA crewed mission. We’ve created the integrated cockpits in the 1990s. At the turn of the century, we launched our workhorse HTF 7,000 engine, which is currently installed on every super midsize aircraft and has logged over two million hours to date.

We strategically acquired two companies in 2024 between CASE and Civitanavi. And most recently, where we’re focusing many of our attention, particularly in our electronic solutions business, is around air traffic control, air traffic management, deploying systems, capabilities, features, functions to enhance the safety in an aircraft, provide situational awareness to the pilots in the aircraft of any potential pending incidents that could occur, particularly in congested airspace in and around airports today. I would say, and one other way to characterize Honeywell is that we are at scale a mission critical system supplier. We are across every single aircraft platform, end market segment, the breadth of the portfolio, the diversification of our end market segments. What I will tell you is we’re about 60% of our business is commercial, 40% of our business is defense with a very well balanced view and mix across those portfolios.

We are on over 500 aircraft platforms today, and we service every single day over 10,000 customers. It is because of that scale, it is because of our technology, it’s because of where we position in the most critical systems on an aircraft platform that we have a seat at the table with regulators and policymakers every single day. When you think about our best in class Honeywell operating system, Honeywell Accelerator, it really allows us to create a culture within the organization and within the business. It is a culture that is continuously striving for improvement, a culture that is continuously looking at standardization of business processes, and a culture that is continuously looking at focusing the organization on the right objectives, the right goals to drive the best outcome for the business. All of this is an enablement.

It’s an enablement to drive our future growth, drive profitability, drive cash flow and allow us to propel ourselves for the future. When I think about the way we operate the business today, we fundamentally have three strategic business units within the portfolio. Every single one of them supporting multiple end market segments, multiple aircraft platforms and that are supported by the over 80 manufacturing and engineering facilities we have around the world and the 30,000 employees that support our business around the world. When I think about the three independent businesses, when we break them down into electronic solutions, you can think of that in terms of integrated cockpits, flight management systems, communications, navigation, surveillance, basically solving the most difficult problems around automating, safety, reliability, efficiency and enhancements. The portion of our business is engines and power systems, where we design gas turbine powered engines for business jets, military aircraft, military helicopters as well as distribute auxiliary power as well throughout the aircraft.

Again, founded upon maximizing performance of the aircraft, maximizing efficiency in a safe and reliable manner. The portion of our business is our control systems business, precise management of cabin pressurization, air and thermal management, engine fuel controls, lighting, wheels and brakes, and electrification of those platforms and solving the most complex thermal management issues that exist on airframes today. The one thing that you will note on the chart is that the balance of the portfolio is not overly indexed to any one portion of the business from a revenue perspective. We’re very well balanced between 40% of our revenue in electronic solutions, 30% in engines and 30% in control solutions. It’s the breadth of that portfolio that allows us to produce integrated systems that maximize the performance of an aircraft, the efficiency of an aircraft and simplicity for our customers.

As illustrated on this chart, one of the things I would make mention of again is how we have an unmatched diversification of the portfolio within the aerospace ecosystem. We are virtually on every single aircraft platform, business jets, air transport, helicopters, space, unmanned aerial vehicles, essentially leveraging our technology across those platforms. The other thing I want to make mention that’s a little bit different for us is our exposure in the commercial portions of our portfolio. We are not over indexed into commercial air transport. We have a very good balance for commercial OE, where half of our business comes from business jets, the other half from commercial air transport.

And if you think about the aftermarket portion of our commercial portfolio, a of it comes from business aviation, two thirds from commercial air transport. As I made mention, we’re on over 500 aircraft platforms around the world today. Not a single one of them represents more than mid single digit revenue as a percent overall for our business. But there’s no better way to truly illustrate where we are in the ecosystem of the aerospace industry than this particular chart, which is one of my favorites that we have. It depicts commercial air transport, defense, business jets.

It depicts by the colors of the circles, anything that you see in red is part of our electronic solutions business. Anything you see in gray is part of our engines and power systems business. Anything you see in black is part of our control systems business. This does not leave much space on these platforms for other content. But I would tell you, it’s just not about the content on the aircraft, but the type of content that you have on the aircraft.

These are all mission critical systems that are solving the most complex issues to maintain safe and reliable aircraft, and they are of the highest value on every single one of these systems. Another thing that I would point out on this chart is how these products and parcels of the portfolio appear on multiple platforms and in multiple crossover end market segments. You’ll see flight management systems, flight controls, flight decks across multiple end market segments. You’ll see APUs across each individual market segment on this chart. You’ll also see precision navigation in commercial air transport, business aviation and defense.

There’s a reason why that is the case, and it’s how we leverage our technology and leverage our investment dollars. The one thing I would say is that we are truly operating in a very, very high momentum industry and market segment with very strong tailwinds associated with it, which bodes well for our business, bodes well for our portfolio. Again, when you think about the breadth of the portfolio in all three end market segments that we are serving. That setup provides us a long term sales CAGR of being in the mid single digit to high single digit range for the aerospace portfolio. And it’s largely driven if you break that down into OE and aftermarket.

We are operating in an environment of historic OE backlogs of aircraft, not only in the air transport space, but also in business aviation, whereas I mentioned before, half of our commercial OE business comes from business aviation. We are also continuing to operate in a very resilient air travel demand environment, as indicated by flight hours that are occurring around the world. And we continue to see high utilization of business jets through fractionals and shared services as well. And not to leave out the defensive space, the continued and ongoing geopolitical issues that are happening around the world, the conflicts that are happening around the world, the amount of investment that is being made around the world, both in support of The US and our allies positions us very well for continued growth in the mid single digit range relative to that on a go forward basis. But what I described to you a moment ago is really driven around something that we call coupled growth.

This is the growth that is attributable to the number of flight hours that you are flying, the number of missions that our military is performing, the production rates of OE aircraft. That is all coupled growth. It’s very simple. Number of flight hours translate to the number of maintenance, repair and overhaul events. The number of production aircraft that are being delivered, depending upon shipset content, translates into how much revenue you have.

That’s all very coupled to the market. Though we embarked upon an additional growth algorithm in Honeywell Aerospace that we started about twenty years ago. It’s precisely it started in 2014. And about five to six years after we started that, we started realizing the benefits of those investments that we were making. And it’s what we call retrofit mods and upgrades or affectionately within Honeywell Aerospace, RMUs.

And this is capitalizing on our installed base that we have today, that unrivaled installed base that I mentioned earlier, whereby these aircraft are flying for fifteen, twenty and thirty years with our equipment. They need to be upgraded. They need to have the latest performance enhancements. They need safety features added to them as well. That falls under the realm of these value offerings of retrofit mods and upgrades that is not coupled to what is occurring in the market segment itself.

Hence, why we call it decoupled growth. And on that journey that we’ve been on, we’ve been able to grow this business into about $1,500,000,000 in 2024 at double digit CAGR growths. It represents about 10% of overall Honeywell Aerospace revenues. And as you can imagine, a lot of these are software upgrades, which brings along with them high margin opportunities to capitalize on that with the installed base. The other area that I would focus in on a little bit about Honeywell Aerospace that makes us a little bit unique is the amount of business that we do in the international market.

And I’m not referring to this market segment for us as foreign military sales. These are direct sales that we make to international defense OEMs and or MODs around the world. Over the last few years, we spent a significant amount of attention and focus in this space, recognizing the opportunity that it created. We have a tremendous amount of commercially developed product that has direct applicability into defense applications in the international market segment. We’re able to sell direct commercially to these customers, these international OEMs and MOD governments as well, therefore, driving double digit growth as noted.

You can see where that attention and focus being applied in about the 2022 timeframe really has translated itself into the growth algorithm and trajectory change, the slope change that we started to see in 2023, ’twenty four, ’twenty five and will continue to be on that trajectory on a go forward basis for us. Our defense business today, about 75% of it is domestic U. S. Defense work. 25% of that business is international and growing again at double digit rates for us, largely driven again, conflicts, geopolitical concerns and the desire for countries to continue to increase their budgets, as noted on the lower right hand side, to continue to be a little bit more self autonomous in terms of how they want to defend themselves.

And this creates unique opportunities for us as well. And it’s part of our international defense growth strategy. Recognizing the desire for countries to be more self reliant, autonomous in their defense needs, particularly here in The EU and establishing that capability to grow that business by looking, acting and operating as part of Honeywell Aerospace in The EU as an EU company. We have over 1,000 engineers sitting here throughout the EU located in Brno in The Czech Republic and in Krakow, Poland that are focused heavily on designing and developing technologies and with an emphasis on designing and developing those technologies for use in defense applications here. Think of it as a local for local capability.

And we recognized the criticality of doing that as well through the acquisition that we did last year of Civitanavi, an inertials company based in Italy, designing low cost, high performing inertials for applicability and usage in the military defense market and a manufacturing footprint in Italy. Absolutely critical. It’s not just about the technology, but it’s establishing footprint. And that’s provided us an anchor point from which we can grow and develop the EU market from an international defense standpoint. But everything that I described, the demand, the opportunities, the technology, the innovation, the products, none of it comes to be without a robust and resilient supply base.

We have won over the last three years over $70,000,000,000 of lifetime contract wins in the Honeywell Aerospace business. Those are products that need to be developed. They are products that need to be manufactured and they are products that need to be delivered to our customers. Over the last couple of years, we’ve spent north of $1,000,000,000 in our supply base through adding resources and touch labor, non touch labor, insourcing, dual sourcing, multi sourcing, such that we’ve been able to realize eleven consecutive quarters of double digit output growth from our factories as a direct result of those investments that we’re making. But it doesn’t stop there.

As you think about the future, we will continue to invest into the supply base like I’ve described. But to get to the next level of output, we’re going to have to look at other areas of investment as well and are part of our plans going forward. That’s capacity expansion for new products that we are introducing into the market. It’s the incorporation of AI tools across the portfolio where now we are digitally connected within the business and down to our suppliers from a planning and procurement perspective. And it’s creating smart factories, automating where we can automate within our factories.

All of that through the work that we’ve done over the last couple of years And what we need to do for the future is going to be an enablement for us to be able to double the size of our business in the 2030s timeframe. I’ll spend a little bit of time here to talk about RD and E investment in the portfolio. Due to our sheer size and scale of our business, we’re able to continually invest in helping our customers solve again those most complex issues that they deal with day in and day out. And we are a trusted partner and have been for decades with our customers to innovate and solve these issues for them. When you look at this chart, our overall spend is actually quite favorable when you comp it against the majority of our peers across the board.

But what I would highlight is that is a one metric to evaluate when you look at RD and E investment. One of the ones that I spend most time focusing on is how did you invest? How efficient were you in that investment? How far were you able to stretch that dollar across the portfolio? And what do I mean by that is that when I talk about the development of products and I talk about core products that we are developing, we develop them for multiple applications, multiple aircraft, multiple end market segments.

You saw that on the earlier chart when I was showing where we are positioned across all three of those end market segments. Why is that important? That’s stretching your investment dollar to the max to be able to capitalize on the capability you have, the technology and driving that into other aircraft platforms. And there’s three examples of that on this chart, three recent examples that I would point to. Three new products, three breakthrough initiatives around Honeywell Anthem, around Asure and around Atoom, whereby on Honeywell Anthem, that integrated flight deck has now been selected on five aircraft platforms crossing multiple end market segments.

The Asure electromechanical actuation system has now been selected on six aircraft platforms across multiple end market segments. And our Honeywell Atune, the compact vapor cycle cooling system has now been selected on five different aircraft platforms and again across multiple end market segments. That’s how you recognize and maximize your ROI on every single dollar that you spend. But those are the recent examples. This is not new.

It’s not novel. We’ve been doing this for decades within Honeywell Aerospace. The other examples that I would give as you think about some of our product franchises that we have across the board, Precision navigational systems, ring laser gyros, again, across commercial, bizjet, defense. Auxiliary power units, the emergency and essential backup power source on your aircraft, again, across commercial, defense, and bizjet. And our fuel control systems, precise fuel flow across reliable and ensuring reliable engine performance, again, across commercial, bizjet, and defense platforms.

So again, this is not new and novel. This is what we’ve been doing for decades to maximize the ROI investments. And not only does that strategy and approach provide you benefit to maximize that, you are able to now efficiently determine how you invest your dollars, where you invest your dollars, manufacturing footprints, how do you maximize your supply chain to drive that and enable that to go forward. But as in any industry, there are trends that you must consider as to what’s happening. And we look at that historically speaking from an advanced technology standpoint.

Over 10% of our current investments today are looking at advanced technologies for development ten years from now, fifteen years from now, twenty years from now. So some of these trends that I’ve highlighted on this page, these six key trends across the top, we were already looking at those ten years ago, fifteen years ago as part of our advanced technology group. You think about the path to autonomy, efficient engine operation, electrification, increased safety, next gen defense and unmanned vehicles. All of these trends are driven to solve certain critical issues that are happening in the aerospace ecosystem. You can think of pilot shortages.

You can think of how can you address that from autonomous operations. You can think of safe and reliable operations in the aircraft. How do you reduce crew interactions with the aircraft? How do you reduce those interfaces with the pilot? Make them automated such that the pilot can focus on those things that really matter.

Those things that are of critical importance during flight, during takeoff, during landings, and the like. The electrification that is happening across the fleet, it’s not about tech and differentiation. Thermal management is a critical element that’s crept into our industry that requires novel and innovative solutions that we are developing. I mentioned earlier some of our technology around Smart X, runway safety and the like and our surface alert technology, which we will certify next year. Again, bringing pilot situational awareness data back into the cockpit so that the pilot can make real time decisions in a much more expeditious manner and drive enhanced safety across the industry.

And then lastly, in the defense space, a very dynamic environment rapidly changing as we are witnessing across the world and technologies and the like, ensuring that we’ve got the proper technologies, the proper systems around electromagnetic warfare, anti jamming solutions, precision navigation, GPS resilient navigations across the board. I could go on and on talking about what our technologists do, our scientists do, our engineers do, what our people do as being an integral fabric of the aerospace ecosystem. But foundationally who we are, we solve complex problems across all forms of aircraft, the most complex problems that drive the highest value across the organization with an eye and a focus on key industry trends, electrification, autonomy as an example. Our business is well balanced across the market, not just in terms of the breadth of the portfolio, but our exposure in commercial air transport, bizjet and defense. And we have the most mature operating model across the industry today, again, simplification, focus, attention and driving margins that are best in class across our industry.

So thank you again for your time. It’s been an honor to be able to talk to you about Honeywell Aerospace. And with that, I’ll turn it back over to Sean for the rest of the program.

Sean Meakim, Investor Relations Lead, Honeywell: Thank you, Jim. Thank you, Vimal, for that presentation. We’re going to end the webcast

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