Up beat trends coming from trade show season in 2025

We caught up with ecube CEO Lee McConnellogue following ISTAT Dublin.

ISTAT Dublin was optimistic with strong sense of progress and lots of positive leads. We’ve got a demanding few months lined up with trips to Arizona for ISTAT Americas and Atlanta for MRO Americas on the horizon.

One area of progress in the industry is in the normalisation of aircraft retirement profiles. We think for ecube and the industry, 2025 will be better than 2024, but 2026 will be better still. There is an uptick in activity generally and at ecube we’re seeing an all-time high.

Toward the end of 2024 we already had 30 aircraft on the ground. This is partly due to our increase in capacity to store and dismantle aircraft, which means we can hoover up supply. It helps that we can disassemble an aircraft in at most 40 days and our average is around 20 days. That’s 500 parts off and crated. We expect this to improve in 2025 as well. So our customers can get their components back for reuse quickly. It’s all about monetising their assets.

There’s more optimism about production at manufacturers too. Boeing is expected to hike deliveries in 2025. It’s not back to pre-pandemic levels, but it’s rising in the right direction.

In the immediate future we see an issue with aircraft that should have had their flying lives extended two years ago. The expectation was that the industry would come back faster than it has. The original plan was probably for these aircraft to have spent the last couple of years being upgraded. But recently, ecube has received multiple aircraft from one customer, which should have had life extension work, but will now be disassembled. These decisions to disassemble rather than extend are being caused by technical requirements. That said, the parts from these aircraft will go to support the flying fleet. We think this trend is being driven by rising prices and the delayed return to normal for the industry.

Our partnership with Unical is showing really positive synergies as we near the six month mark. There’s value going in both directions and the focus for all aircraft storage, transition and disassembly operations are now centralised within the ecube network in St Athan in Wales, Castellón in Spain and Coolidge, Arizona in the USA. This means that Unical has ceased operations at its San Bernardino site (SBD) since 31 January 2025.

So, it’s all looking like a positive upward climb for 2025. Let’s catch up over the next few months. We’ll be in Arizona in March for ISTAT Americas and April will see us travel to Atlanta, Georgia for MRO Americas (Booth 403).