GE Aerospace celebrates successful first year as standalone company
January 27, 2025
GE Aerospace has posted strong first full-year results after becoming a standalone company in April 2024, indicating growth across the board particularly bolstered by a 38% order increase in the commercial engines and services division.
“GE Aerospace delivered a strong finish to 2024 given robust demand for our services and products with fourth quarter orders up 46%,” confirmed GE Aerospace chairman and CEO Lawrence Culp. “Our performance capped off a monumental first year as a standalone company with $1.7 billion of profit growth and $1.3 billion of free cash flow growth”.
In the full year 2024, GE reported total orders of $50.3 billion (a rise of 32%), of which $40.2 billion were commercial engines and services (up 38%). Q4 saw a particularly strong performance for the business area, with orders and revenue up 50% and 19% year-on-year respectively. Services also grew 12% driven by expanded shop visit workscope, higher spare parts, and price.
GE also celebrated receiving EASA / FAA certification of its LEAP-1A durability kit in Q4 2024, which – combined with three prior durability enhancements – is designed to double LEAP engine time on wing compared to current levels, as well as being “easier to produce”. However, Culp cautioned the importance of collaborating with suppliers to work through capacity constraints and bottlenecks to further unlock operational efficiencies.
In total, GE received more than 4,600 commercial and defence engines during the year, including American Airlines’ commitment for 85 new LEAP-1B-powered 737 MAX aircraft. However, for the year, LEAP deliveries were down 10% (“in line with expectations”) as supply chain constraints continued to impact total deliveries. LEAP aftermarket capacity was also extended by around 40% in 2024, supporting the growing fleet of 3,300 LEAP-powered aircraft with 10,000 engines in backlog.
With GE remaining focused on delivering on its new engine backlog, it continues to employ its “proprietary lean operating model” called ‘Flight Deck’, an initiative launched in 2024. This proved instrumental in helping “tackle supply chain constraints head on” in the latter portion of the year, where GE “delivered meaningful improvement as material inputs increased 26% across [its] priority supplier sites”.
With 15 or so “critical suppliers” that GE is “working intensely with,” it also has more than 500 people “embedded in the supply base working to identify and eliminate constraints”.
CFO and senior vice president Rabul Ghai elaborated that the profitability of the LEAP programme throughout 2024 “tended to be better than [GE’s] initial expectation, from higher external spare parts volume, better pricing, lower warranty expenses… and more shop visits,” with the expectation for LEAP and CFM to deliver the same amount of profit for the company “late towards the end part of this decade”.
In 2025, GE looks to “maintain momentum as [it aims] to deliver another year of substantial revenue, EPS and cash growth,” with a profit in the range of $7.8 billion to $8.2 billion. Additionally, with the 777X back in flight testing (and nearly 1,000 GE9X engines now in backlog), “we think it’s going to be a great wide-body programme over time,” continued Culp. “I like to think that with the delays, we’ve made good use of that time with respect to just additional testing, probably going to end up being the most tested engine in our history”.
