Lufthansa Technik will build a new facility in northern Portugal to expand its capacities for the repair of engine parts and components.
The Hamburg-based company, which is the engineering unit of the German airline group, said on 9 December that the new 54,000sq m plant in Santa Maria da Feira, near Porto, will be completed by the end of 2027.
“For the first time in the company’s history, we are building and opening our own location in Portugal,” says Lufthansa Technik’s chief operating officer Harald Gloy. “Lufthansa Technik is pursuing ambitious growth targets and we want to further expand our position as the global market leader in the MRO sector in the future.”
The company says the facility will create 700 jobs, for which it will begin recruiting “soon”.
Earlier this year, Lufthansa Technik had said it planned to invest €1.2 billion ($1.3 billion) in the next four years to support its Ambition 2030 strategic growth initiative after parent Lufthansa last November scrapped plans to divest a partial stake of the company.
Ambition 2030 plans for the company to almost double its revenue to more than €10 billion and profit to more than €1 billion by the end of this decade. To do that, Stark said in March that the company will focus on its core business, expand its international presence through acquisitions and also expand its digital business models.
He said at the time that the company needs the new facility in southwestern Europe to serve the company’s growth trajectory. Some work “will migrate” from the company’s current location in Hamburg, but he added that new business fields will be added, allowing the Hamburg site, also, to grow.
In August, Lufthansa Technik acquired an 80% stake in ETP Thermal Dynamics, a US-based company that specializes in MRO services for heat exchangers, oil and fuel coolers, also as a part of the strategy.
The company says it chose the location in Portugal for the new plant because of the country’s “stable political framework conditions [and] the good infrastructure and the attractive labor market in particular”.
Lufthansa Technik will also set up a training centre in Santa Maria da Feira in the coming year to train the future employees.
