ATR has fallen short of its delivery target for 2023 but hailed the tally of 36 aircraft – a 44% increase over the previous year – as “a big achievement”.
Chief executive Nathalie Tarnaud Laude, who had predicted in September that the Toulouse-based business would ship at least 40 turboprops, blamed the shortfall on lingering supplier challenges and unforeseen problems around the financing of two aircraft at the end of the year.
She says that two aircraft expected to be included in the December count were handed over early in the new year, and that ATR would deliver “more than 40” ATR 42-600s and 72-600s in 2024.
She adds that after a difficult post-pandemic period, during which annual deliveries fell to just 25 in 2022, the Airbus-Leonardo joint venture was “back on track” and that 2024 would be “a year of stabilization, paving the way for future growth”.
With 40 net orders in 2023, a 53% rise from the previous year, Laude says ATR’s problem is not lack of market demand. Instead, raw material and component shortages are hampering the manufacturer’s attempts to ramp up.
“We expect it to continue to be intense during 2024, which is why we are being quite cautious on output, but we would hope to start to normalise by the end of the year,” she says.
ATR says it achieved almost $1.2 billion in revenues for the first time since the pandemic, with services revenue at a record $400 million.
Laude denies that an active market in used ATRs – there were close to 100 transactions in 2023 – is a threat to new aircraft sales. “These are different customers. We see this positively,” she says.
ATR in December resumed flight testing of a short take-off and landing (STOL) variant of the ATR 42-600 – now in its production design configuration – that it now hopes to have certificated by June 2025. The variant was launched in 2019 and the original target certification date was 2022.
The company has orders for 21 STOL aircraft, roughly the same as shortly after launch, but Laude expects this to increase once flight test data is published. “Some customers are waiting for performance figures before they commit, which is understandable,” she says. “We expect more orders in the second half of 2024.”
