A Chinese factory and a move into one of the most lucrative airline markets in the world, line-fit approval from Boeing, and designing its first business-class product. All these are in the near-term sights of UK seating manufacturer Acro as part of an expansion strategy initiated by its £55 million ($77 million) acquisition last September by Chinese automotive seat-maker ZTC.
The purchase by Shanghai-based ZTC is the latest Chinese swoop into European aerospace. In recent years, Chinese concerns have bought brands such as cabin monuments specialist AIM Altitude and Thompson Aircraft Seating, general aviation manufacturer Diamond, and UK aerostructures firm Gardner. Acro gave ZTC, which had been eying the aviation market, a “ready-made aircraft seat division”, says Acro’s senior vice-president sales, Alan McInnes.
Life had already been eventful for the London-Gatwick based company, which celebrated its 10th birthday last year. In that decade, it had gone from designing a non-reclinable model for its first customer – Leisure carrier Jet2 – to developing a more sophisticated successor, winning its first deal outside the low-cost sector with Air New Zealand, and becoming a factory-fit supplier for Airbus.
The next few years are set to be even busier for Acro, which has shipped 90,000 seats and will continue to be run by co-founder and chief executive Chris Brady. One of the biggest changes will be moving from being almost entirely a supplier to the retrofit market to one that will have about half its seats factory-installed by 2020.
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While its first line-fit deal was with US low-cost airline Spirit in 2015, Acro’s seat became available in the Airbus catalogue only in February last year. Since then, it has shipped line-fit seats for Allegiant, and will begin deliveries later this year for Viva Air – a 50-aircraft contract – as well as China’s Spring Airlines, for 60 aircraft. The ANZ deal – announced at AIX last year – is for 18 A320neo family aircraft.
The deals have given Acro a 5% share of Airbus single-aisle seating, McInnes maintains. Boeing is next on the target list. While Acro has supplied seats for retrofit to 737 operators, it has yet to be selected as a catalogue supplier. “Boeing have audited us and approved us as a transactional supplier, which means that if any airline goes to them and says they want Acro seats, they have no objection,” he says. “But our aim is to have line-fit approval by 2020.”
At the same time, Acro wants to move into Airbus widebodies. While it has manufactured seats that have been fitted on A330s, McInnes admits the company is not “known as a twin-aisle supplier”. To that end, it is working on the “Series 8” – a more “cradled” product alongside its original Series 3 model and its Series 6 successor. “We want to be twin-aisle offerable with Airbus sometime this year, and we are getting the right noises,” he says.
Airbus has been “really supportive” of Acro’s strategy, “because we are giving them additional capacity,” says McInnes. Acro is currently producing up to 3,000 seats a month at Gatwick, but that can be raised to 6,000 relatively easily, he says, because of a business model that sees most production outsourced to a largely UK-based supply base. Airbus’s ambition to be building 70 narrowbodies a month is dependent on “resilience in its own supply chain”, he adds.
Future capacity increases should be met with an assembly line in China. Although Acro will soon deliver to Spring and ANZ, “you will struggle to find an Acro seat east of Moscow”, McInnes says. To that end, Acro is recruiting an Asian-based sales team and planning to open a factory in Shanghai early next year, focusing primarily on retrofit. As the Chinese fleet grows and ages, “the retrofit market could soon be bigger than line-fit,” he says.
Source: Flight Daily News
