H. Lawrence Culp
Analyst · Wolfe Research
Thanks, Blaire, and we appreciate everyone joining us today. The GE Aerospace team is guided by our purpose: to invent the future of flight, lift people up and bring them home safely. At any given moment, nearly 1 million people are flying with GE Aerospace technology under wing. That is a significant responsibility that our 53,000 employees carry with great pride. We use FLIGHT DECK, our proprietary lean operating model to continuously improve safety, quality, delivery and cost always in that order, as we strive to provide unrivaled customer service and deliver our roughly $175 billion backlog. Before we dive in further, I want to acknowledge the tragedy of Air India flight 171. We extend our heartfelt sympathies to the families and loved ones of those who lost their lives. Since June the 12th, our focus has been and remains on supporting our customers and providing technical support to the regulators. While we were looking forward to a broader update with you in Paris, Rahul and I are here today to share our second quarter results and our increased outlook. We'll create additional opportunities later this year to share more of the operational details we expected to cover with you in Paris. Turning to the next slide. Safety is and always will be foundational to everything we do. Through decades of experience, learning and continuous improvement, we've built our Reactive, Proactive and our Predictive safety processes. GE Aerospace was the first manufacturer to have a Safety Management System, or SMS, accepted by the FAA. We established our SMS a decade before the agency proposed requiring it. The system encourages our employees to report safety concerns voluntarily and ensures that they are thoroughly evaluated. SMS, together with our Quality Management System are the foundation of our safety culture, while our approach to continuous improvement helps us drive safety up the value chain. FLIGHT DECK further standardizes our own processes to support safety investigations, leading to identifying corrective actions faster. We're also enhancing engine inspections to begin at the part level, extend through manufacturing and continue into the aftermarket. And now we're deploying AI-enabled tools to further improve inspection accuracy and consistency helping to predict potential safety threats. Everyone at GE Aerospace owns safety, and we never compete on safety. Turning to Slide 5. GE Aerospace is an exceptional franchise. As a global aerospace leader in propulsion, services and systems, we're well positioned to benefit from favorable long-term market trends across both commercial and defense. Our Commercial Engines & Services business, or CES, is servicing and growing the industry's most extensive commercial installed base. We're proud to be underwing on 3 out of every 4 commercial flights demonstrating our unmatched scale and scope across the world's most successful and innovative aircraft platforms. Our Defense & Propulsion Technologies business, or DPT powers 2/3 of all U.S. military combat and helicopter fleets. DPT offers both the leading defense programs of today while developing mission-critical technology for the future. Let's take a closer look at GE Aerospace today. As the industry's largest and growing engine fleet, our business model is highly resilient, largely due to our balanced exposure across narrow-body, wide-body regional and defense platforms. CES has more than 49,000 engines in service and growing. In 2024, we delivered a particularly strong year with $27 billion of revenue, growing 13%, with robust services demand and performance supporting higher profit. About half of our revenue comes from narrow-body platforms, while wide-body represents 35%. In DPT, we have more than 29,000 engines in service. 2024 was a solid year with nearly $10 billion in revenue, up 6% and profit up double digits. Our Defense & Systems business accounts for roughly 2/3 of DPT revenue, including over 70% of revenue from U.S. customers and around 30% internationally. Propulsion & Additive Technologies represents the remaining 1/3 with exposure to commercial programs and localized European defense capabilities. Notably, 70% of our total revenue comes from recurring predictable and highly profitable services, including 3 quarters of CES revenue and more than half of DPT revenue. This represents a significant growth opportunity as our commercial installed base continues to grow at a low single to mid-single-digit compounded growth rate through the end of the decade. Services also enable us to live the customer experience and strengthen our relationships, seeing and hearing their needs firsthand, while shaping our product road maps to ensure alignment with their future priorities. Turning to Slide 7. Given macroeconomic dynamics, we're watching demand near term. This quarter, departures grew nearly 4%, in line with our expectations. For 2025, we're still planning for low single-digit departures growth, taking a more conservative view on the second half. Broadly speaking, we support promoting free and fair trade including the duty-free environment that has long fueled the U.S. aerospace sector, leading to more than 1.8 million U.S. jobs and a $75 billion annual trade surplus. We commend the administration for the U.S. U.K. trade deal, eliminating tariffs on the aerospace sector and view this deal as a strong framework for future trade agreements. Longer term, GE Aerospace is operating from a position of strength. Our robust orders over the last several quarters have increased our commercial services backlog to now over $140 billion supporting growth for years to come. Across the commercial sector specifically, we see strong fundamentals. Air traffic growth is expected to outpace global GDP, especially in Asia Pac and the Middle East and new aircraft builds and airline expansions remain healthy, supporting the growth of our installed base. On the defense side, we see solid momentum globally towards modernization and localization. Domestically, we're pleased the reconciliation package includes funding for key defense propulsion initiatives with more than $1 billion for sixth-generation aircraft programs. Internationally, we're expecting faster growth than in the U.S., largely in response to rising global tensions and the evolving geopolitical landscape. Overall, we expect the market to grow at a mid-single-digit compounded growth rate through 2028, reaffirming our strong trajectory. Moving to Slide 8. Our vision is clear: to be the company that defines flight for today, tomorrow and in the future. For today, we're ramping up services and equipment to support our customers' fleets, while fulfilling strong demand for new engines. For tomorrow, we're expanding capacity and capabilities to deliver on while growing our backlog. This includes expanding our supply chain and service networks and investing in technologies to further enhance engine performance. And for the future, we're building the technological foundation that will define the future of flight across both commercial and defense. FLIGHT DECK is a systematic approach to running our company, translating strategy into outcomes while advancing our culture. Let me share here a few examples of FLIGHT DECK in action to support our multiyear services and equipment ramp. Earlier this year, we launched a new technology and operations team to hardwire and accelerate the FLIGHT DECK enhancements we made last year often in partnership with our suppliers. The team is providing greater stability and transparency to our demand signals and stronger collaboration to help identify and then break constraints. This helps our suppliers deliver today while investing to support the ramp in the future. We're also removing waste within our own operations with a focus on improving output and turnaround times. Take our largest MRO site in Celma, Brazil, which is responsible for a 1/4 of our global volume. Here, the CFM56 fan module has been the key constraint to reaching our turnaround time target. Our cross-functional team used value stream mapping and implemented flow lines to reduce lead time by over 30%. Now CFM56 turnaround time at Celma is below 80 days. Additionally, our recently deployed AI-enabled Blade Inspection Tool is improving inspection accuracy and consistency, while reducing inspection time by roughly 50%. Improvements like this are driving turnaround times closer to 90 days for GEnx and CFM56 in our larger shops. That said, we have more work to do on our other platforms. And finally, we're expanding capacity with the LEAP installed base expected to roughly triple and GEnx to roughly double by 2030. We're growing our lead third-party MRO network which includes 6 premier partners in this quarter, we saw significantly higher third- party leap shop visits. Additionally, last year, we announced we'll invest more than $1 billion in our MRO and component repair facilities over the next 5 years. We've added XEOS in Poland in partnership with Lufthansa Technik to our MRO network, which inducted its first LEAP engine earlier this year. And we're investing more than $1 billion across our U.S. factories and supply chain infrastructure to support growth. Overall, we expect to grow internal and external capacity by approximately 40% by the end of the decade. The impact of FLIGHT DECK and our technology and operations team combined is delivering better operational outcomes with substantial momentum. In the second quarter, material input at our priority supplier sites was up 10% sequentially. Stability also continued to improve, with suppliers delivering more than 95% of committed volume, up nearly twofold versus early last year. This contributed significantly to second quarter output. CES services revenue was up nearly 30% year-over-year, supported by internal shop visit revenue up more than 20% and spare parts revenue up over 25%. Total engine deliveries were up 45% with commercial up 37%, including LEAP, up 38% and Defense up 84%. And through the first half, we've delivered 12% growth in commercial units, including LEAP up 10% and 37% growth in defense deliveries. Overall, material input improvement has resulted in higher inventory as we accelerate output and grow LEAP deliveries 15% to 20% here in 2025. But I do want to pause here and just thank our teams and our suppliers who are working hand-in-hand to deliver for our customers, both near term and longer term. We move to Slide 11. We've won some sizable deals so far in 2025. I'd like to highlight a few. Qatar Airways announced a significant expansion of their fleet with a deal for over 400 GEnx and GE9X engines, marking the largest wide-body win in GE Aerospace history. IAG announced an agreement for 32 Boeing 787 aircraft powered by GEnx for British Airways. This further builds upon our growing backlog for GEnx and our life-of-program win rate now stands at 75%. And in defense, the U.S. Air Force awarded a $5 billion contract were our F110 engines to meet the evolving needs of allied operators. Today, we have more than 1,600 commercial and defense engines in backlog and we're effectively sold out through the rest of this decade. Turning to Slide 12. GE Aerospace is a business with tremendous competitive advantages built on decades of experience and significant investment. With the world's largest installed base of engines, we've accumulated over 2.3 billion flight hours, providing us with unmatched insights on performance, opportunities for improvement and future breakthroughs. Add to that, R&D investment of approximately $3 billion in 2025, or 6% to 8% of revenue per year, we're well positioned to enhance our foundational and current generation platforms, while inventing the future of flight. Here's a specific example, composite fan blades, a technology that only GE Aerospace and our partners have in service today. Compared to traditional metal blades, these lighter and stronger fan blades were first introduced on the GE90. Now with over 140 million flight hours on more than 2,500 engines in service, these blades are helping us deliver industry-leading departure reliability. Our experience with the GE90, along with GEnx and LEAP has informed the GE9X development with fourth-generation composite fan blades. These blades contribute to the platform's overall performance with enhanced durability and fuel burn. And finally, we're designing composite fan blades for the CFM RISE program, combining 30 years of experience with continued investment to help deliver the next step change in durability and efficiency. More on that in a moment, but let me first share with you how our current generations of engines is ramping with customer needs in mind. Looking at Slide 13. Durability and reliability are the top priorities to ensure consistent performance for our customers. Leveraging our experience over multiple product generations, we're maturing technologies to deliver meaningful durability gains. Take the GEnx, for example. We launched the platform back in 2011 and released our durability package back in 2021. This resulted in a more than 2.5x increase in time on wing, supporting increased utilization. Today, the fleet leader hot and harsh environments is approaching 4,000 cycles and still running. This means customers are keeping engines on wing about 5 years between shop visits and even longer in neutral environments. This has been a differentiator for us in the marketplace, underpinning our 90%-plus win rate since 2023. Through our hot and harsh experience here, we've refined our ability testing to replicate thus challenges, innovate effective fixes and validate them. And we're the only engine manufacturer able to leverage this extensive wide-body experience for narrow-body engines, which has accelerated the LEAP learning curve getting to mature time on wing faster. The LEAP-1A durability kit released late last year that includes the upgraded HPT blade is now incorporated into all LEAP-1A deliveries and shop visits. This will improve time on wing by more than twofold, matching our industry-leading CFM56 performance. Next up, we're working with Boeing to certify the LEAP-1B durability kit in the first half of 2026. But we haven't stopped there. As we tested the upgraded HPT blade, our teams, leveraging FLIGHT DECK found further design improvements, which are already certified and set to enter production in the second half of 2025 further enhancing HPT blade producibility. These durability enhancements have supported a win rate of over 70% on the A320 family since 2023. Turning to Slide 14. We're also using our experience to enhance new engine platforms before they enter service. Starting with the GE9X, the most tested engine in GE Aerospace history with more than 30,000 cycles, the equivalent of 6 years of commercial flying. Drawing on our GEnx and LEAP experience, this is the first time we've completed dust testing prior to launch, which has informed product enhancements, such as the second iteration of the HPT blades. Importantly, we're ensuring that the GE9X is as close to maturity as it can be at launch. We're also progressing the CFM RISE program, our most ambitious and transformative technological effort underway. To date, we've completed over 350 program tests with an early focus on durability, this includes advancing new HPT blade cooling technology and testing full-size fan blades, along with more than 3,000 endurance cycles. And earlier this year at the Airbus Summit, we outlined our vision for the future of propulsion with open fan technology. Airbus and CFM teams continue to work together on engine and airframe integration as we look forward to engine ground level and flight test this decade. Big picture, we're continuously applying learnings and improving durability to advance new programs, ensuring we deliver the best performing engines for our customers. Spending another moment on CFM RISE, which will be a game changer for customers, prioritizing safety, durability and efficiency. Looking at the open fan architecture. First on safety. Leveraging our experience with composite fan blades, the open fan will spend slower at 1/6 the speed of a traditional jet engine. This helps provide a safe flying experience even without an nacelle, and we also expect will result in a quieter engine than today's LEAP. Turning to durability. RISE's open fan architecture gains efficiency through the fan system rather than the core. This reduces the need to push the core to higher temperatures as much as a ducted engine, a key driver of today's engine removals. And finally, efficiency. Our customers need at least a 20% reduction in fuel burn to support investments in next-generation technology. In our view, the open fan is the most promising path to accomplish the step change in efficiency. When it comes to delivering greater durability and fuel burn, we won't compromise on either, as we recognize both are critical for our customers. With RISE, we believe we can accomplish the genius of the AND, meeting customer needs for durability and delivering fuel efficiency. Turning to Slide 16. We're pursuing similar generational advancements in military propulsion. In the U.S., we completed testing on the XA100 adaptive cycle engine demonstrating significant gains in thrust and range. Building on that success, we're now progressing to the XA102, aligned with the U.S. Air Force's next-generation adaptive propulsion or NGAP program. Importantly, earlier this month, Congress funded $750 million for the F/A-XX through the reconciliation bill in the coming years. And the U.S. Navy recognized its need for a sixth-generation fighter as the only platform capable of delivering the combination of range, stealth, advanced sensors and standoff capabilities necessary to operate across mission sets in highly contested environments. We stand ready to deliver and encourage the Pentagon to move forward with this important program that Congress has already funded. Through Avio Aero, we represent Italy as an equal propulsion partner with the U.K. and Japan in the Global Combat Air program, a next-gen indigenous European fighter. We're actively investing to support a targeted 2035 entry into service. And at the same time, with Kratos, we're advancing propulsion technologies for affordable unmanned aerial systems by the end of the decade. And to accelerate development of advanced hypersonic propulsion systems, we recently announced significant investments in our test infrastructure at select manufacturing sites, enabling us to conduct higher mission relevant testing. Inventing the future flight has always motivated the GE Aerospace team. We're building upon our leadership positions across both defense and commercial. Shifting to the outlook on Slide 17. Rahul will cover the second quarter results momentarily. But so far, in '25, we're off to an excellent start enabling us to raise both our near- and longer-term outlook. For 2028, we're raising our outlook for profit and free cash flow by $1.5 billion versus our prior view driven by strong operating and commercial services performance. We expect to sustain strong adjusted revenue growth at a double-digit compounded rate, which will be supported by robust demand for services and equipment. We expect to drive meaningful operating leverage over that period with adjusted EPS reaching of roughly $8.40. Operating profit is expected to reach approximately $11.5 billion with margins expanding to more than 21%. And we expect to generate substantial free cash flow of at least $8.5 billion with conversion around 100%. All in, this represents operating profit growth of more than $3 billion compared to our updated '25 guide driven by commercial services. We're well positioned for continued value creation for years to come. Let me pass it here over to Rahul.