DAILY INSIGHT – 21 January 2019: Dassault Acquires ExecuJet MRO Facilities

News: Dassault, the manufacturer of Falcon Jets, announced today that it has acquired ExecuJet’s MRO facilities.  This will add 15 new factory-owned maintenance bases in Asia-Pacific, Middle-East, Africa and Oceania regions.  The company will retain the ExecuJet name, but will now be owned by Dassault and incorporated into the Falcon Jet support network.

Analysis: Overnight, Dassault grows from five company-owned service centers to 20 locations, providing a global footprint for factory-owned MRO

and services operations.  Dassault understands that its customers are seeking additional OEM involvement in MRO, and are taking advantage of their unique position to increase services revenues. 

Insight:  The trend for OEMs providing additional support to high-technology aircraft is occurring not only in business aircraft, but in commercial aircraft as well.  As aircraft become more complex, and OEMs have access to “big data” providing analytics that can predict failures and reduce maintenance costs, operators are increasingly looking to the factory for MRO services. Service that encompass the learning and experience from big data can often only be provided by the OEMs, who have the strategic advantage of collecting fleet-wide data for analytics.  Big data is becoming the future differentiator in the MRO market, providing a long-term advantage to OEMs, who are gearing up to take advantage of that situation.  Dassault has made a sound strategic purchase to grow its future MRO services as the era of big data arrives.