ITP Aero is on a mission. With new chief executive Eva Azoulay at the helm, the former Rolls-Royce subsidiary is coming to the Farnborough air show for the first time as a standalone company, with a new appearance, and something to prove.
“One of our key objectives is to change our positioning,” Azoulay said, speaking to FlightGlobal in an interview in early July ahead of the show. “Since ITP was founded 35 years ago, we have significantly grown and evolved our capabilities, and we now span the world.”
The company, headquartered near Bilbao in northern Spain, supplies components for a variety of civil and defence aviation programmes, including low-pressure turbines for the Rolls-Royce Trent XWB, Trent 1000 and Trent 7000. It also participates in production of engine parts for the Europrop International TP400 and the Pratt & Whitney PW1100G.
Azoulay was named chief executive last October, after spending more than 25 years at Pratt & Whitney.
“For the first time, being a true independent player in this industry - that opens a lot of doors for us, to be able to work with a multitude of OEMs, and allows us to take ourselves to the next to the next level,” she says.
The company currently has 5,500 employees at 14 locations in six countries including India, Mexico and the USA. In the past year alone, ITP Aero added more than 500 new employees.
Rolls-Royce in September 2021 confirmed the sale of ITP Aero for €1.7 billion ($2 billion) to a Spanish consortium led by Bain Capital. It had acquired ITP Aero in 2017, turning it into a wholly-owned subsidiary after picking up the majority shareholding of the venture in which it had previously held 47%. The Bain consortium included Spanish companies SAPA and JB Capital.
For 2023, the first full year under Bain Capital’s ownership, the company recorded €1.305 billion in revenue, up 25% from 2022, when it sat in the 57th spot on FlightGlobal’s Top 100 Aerospace companies ranked by revenue.
“We’re on the fastest-growing platforms, like Trent XWB, like the Pratt Whitney PW1100,” she says. “If you’ve flown on an Airbus A320 with GTF power, our parts are in there. If you’ve flown on a Rolls-Royce-powered A350, our parts are in there.”
At the end of 2023, as Azoulay came on board, she says the company “reset its strategic purpose” and is now focusing on advanced propulsion technologies such as hydrogen and electric propulsion and the usage of sustainable aviation fuels on a large scale, as well as building out its aftermarket capabilities.
“We have invested $600 million over the last several years, $66 million just last year, in research and development, to position ourselves on the future flight technologies front to and be ready for the next generation” of aircraft,” she says.
“On the maintenance, repair and overhaul side, we were not very active,” she says. “We’ve always been a strong player for the Spanish defense forces, where we service the majority of their engines, but in the commercial world, because of our ownership structure, that did put certain limitations on our ability to grow in that space, so we really think that’s a clear evolution of capability.”
This past April, ITP Aero signed a contract extension with the Colombian ministry of defence covering overhaul services for the GE Aerospace T700 engines that power the Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters operated by its armed forces.
Running until June 2026, work under the contract will be carried out at ITP Aero’s facilities in Albacete, Spain.
“We develop new processes, new technology that we use on our manufacturing front that we think will be very well served in the repair market also,” she adds. “We know these engines. We’re part of the design development process, so we think we bring a lot of value in repair and overhaul.”
“Every provider is looking for increased skills and capability. And so for us, that’s a significant growth path of leveraging our skills and people to develop repairs, to do aftermarket overhaul and repairs on the right product line.”
In the USA, the company recently expanded its engine MRO footprint with the addition of BP Aero in Texas, a leading provider of aircraft engine aftermarket services. The transaction closed in February.
But despite striking out on its own, ITP Aero has also remained a “key strategic supplier and partner” for Rolls-Royce.
For example in June, at the ILA trade show in Berlin, Rolls-Royce’s German unit and ITP Aero joined forces to pursue a new engine based on the former’s Advance2 two-spool core designed to equip a future ‘loyal wingman’ uncrewed aircraft in the 10t-plus class to enter service in the early part of next decade.
The two companies unveiled an engine mock-up at ILA, and said the developmental powerplant would leverage technologies deployed on Rolls-Royce’s Pearl-series business jet engines – turbofans with thrust in the 15,000-18,000lb (67-80kN) range.
ITP Aero is also supplying components for the propulsion system of Europe’s Future Combat Air System (FCAS) within a consortium that includes Safran Aircraft Engines, assisted by MTU Aero Engines.
“This is a long cycle industry,” Azoulay says. “We need to build the technology now for what we hope will be the launch of new product lines in the future. Today, we’re working with all of the OEMs, trying to understand where the technology is going in the future, and where is it that we can develop the that next generation capability so we can continue to be a significant player in this space.
“You definitely can’t be stagnant.”
