Amid the burgeoning MRO scene in Asia Boeing says there is nowhere better than the Singapore Airshow to update progress on the company’s drive to capture a much larger share of the services work on Boeing and other aircraft through the newly created Global Services division.

Six months after officially launching Boeing Global Services (BGS), the company says it is already seeing revenues climb in line with the seemingly audacious target of generating US$50 billion annually within five to 10 years, a figure that equals roughly half of Boeing’s current sales. In its latest earnings call Boeing showed the BGS business ended 2017 with US$6 billion in orders, reinforcing expectations that the overall services business will be worth at least US$2.6 trillion over the next decade as MRO needs rise in lockstep with increasing deliveries. 

Boeing Global Services merged the company’s commercial and defense services portfolios. Stan Deal, the president and CEO of the new Dallas-based business, is committed to growing Boeing’s portion of the services market beyond the current 7% aftermarket share on commercial aircraft in service and 9% on military aircraft. “As we get to this US$50 billion we want to be in the low double digits. As to where that falls out, I think that’s going to be based on making sure we’re creating value in the eyes of the customer. But I don’t think you jump to the market share numbers that we have on the platform side on day one,” he says.

“A lot of the hard work over the past six months has been executing on the commitments we’ve had with our customers and going out and winning new business,” says Deal. “We’ve got big plans as we go into 2018 here and continuing on a pace to grow this to be an important part of the Boeing business but more importantly, [a] value-added set of capabilities for our customers.”

Part of the process involves educating the market about the new BGS approach as well as listening to operators about what they want Boeing’s new arm to offer. “Within the six-month period we’ve been spending a lot of time out and about with the customers talking about our existing commitments, as well as talking about demands for capabilities that they’d like to see out of Boeing. And making investments, if you will, around innovations that could align up with those needs our customers have and bring different capabilities to market.”

In addition to gaining more business from current capabilities, Deal expects to bolster growth with selective acquisitions and the launch of new services, such as the 737BCF freighter conversion and Jeppesen FliteDeck Pro 3.0. Boeing Global Services has launched with four core service capabilities: supply chain; engineering, modifications and MRO; digital software; and training/professional services. Those four service capabilities are in turn to be distributed across four channels: commercial; business and general aviation; U.S. government; and international governments.

Of the four core services Deal sees digital as perhaps having the biggest potential in the long term. “When I think about this US$50 billion growth target, I think that is an area that has the most net gross potential. You know we’ve kind of sized it as a 10x opportunity on digital. You see this revolution throughout many major industries where the use of information to drive efficiency and asset utilization upward is a real powerful set of capabilities,” he says. 

As an example Deal points to the implementation of a fuel-monitoring system for operators. “On a fleet basis that’s been saving between 2% and 3% in terms of total fleet consumption. Our aircraft health monitoring has been eliminating unplanned schedule events that save in the region of 3-4% of maintenance costs expenditures,” he adds.

“We also just announced in December for first-quarter availability, a set of self-serve analytic tools that airlines will be able to utilize on their own. A lot of our tools have been crew, health monitoring, a combination of Boeing capability in conjunction with the airline tailoring. What airlines have been telling us is, ‘Now give us the ability to just go play with the data on our own and a tool suite.’ And so we’ve done that,” says Deal.