The JV between Wood Dale, IL-based aerospace and defense aftermarket solutions company AAR Corporation and Indamer Aviation, known as AAR-Indamer Technics, aims to increase business in India’s growing domestic MRO market.
Rajeev Gupta, CEO of Nagpur, India-based AAR-Indamer Technic shared his views on the company’s progress in India and its future plans.
On the benefits of this type of joint venture being established in India:
Gupta said that the JV has put India on the world market as a quality MRO center, and opened up aircraft maintenance opportunities for the Indian sub-continent, Middle East, and Sub Sahara Africa region for narrow body maintenance.
“India is a very vibrant and progressive aviation market. It has been growing at a phenomenal pace in the last 20 years. From the MRO spend prospective in aviation it is poised to become the third largest market in the world after U.S. and China.”
On support from the Indian Government:
“The Indian Government has been very supportive and are keen for the growth of this sector. They have opened special economic zones to offer tax benefits to specific locations, and have reduced goods and services tax from 18% to 5%. Suppliers to special economic zones have been listed as GST-free which brings competitiveness to the MRO to compete on the international stage.
Although there has been no financial support in terms of grants or inexpensive loans or land, the Indian Government has offered enhancement of working capitals (due to the impact of COVID) without providing additional collateral.”
On sourcing people and establishing capabilities:
“India has always benefited from having a pool of highly trained English speaking technical manpower. Due to pandemic induced job losses in the Gulf and South East Asia, technicians and manpower have been impacted and we have been able to attract high quality experienced manpower to work with us.
On targets of the JV set out by AAR and Indamer:
“The target is to be able to attract a 50% Indian market share in the short term. We don’t want to focus solely on airlines in India, but [we will] also focus on the Middle East and Sub Sahara Africa regions. One of the other major targets for us is to participate in the defense sector for maintenance of helicopters and transport fleet of the Air Force.
Since AAR has a defense portfolio too for supporting supply chain and logistics solutions along with MRO to the defense world globally, we plan to take advantage of their expertise on capturing major defense work.”
