Locatory.com: passenger traffic growth in Latin American will trigger a bigger demand for aviation spare parts

According to the Latin American and Caribbean Air Transport Association (ALTA), over 140 million of passengers were carried by local airlines in 2011, i.e 3.8% more than in 2010. Such market growth along with the aging aircraft fleet will eventually trigger an increase in demand for MRO services and spare parts solutions.

As a rule, spare parts demand reflects the number of aircraft in use. Today there are about 1000 aircraft in Latin America. 67-70% of the fleet consists of narrow-body jets, 20% of regional planes and around 10% of wide-body jets. In less than 10 years’ time the overall number of aircraft in the region will almost double and reach approx. 1800. ‘The rapidly growing Latin American aircraft fleet responds to the increasing passenger traffic (7.7% per year) in the region. The MRO market will obviously also exceed its current $2 bln. worth,’ comments the CCO of Locatory.com Vytautas Vorobjovas. It is expected that the local MRO market will see an annual 4-5% growth and will increase by almost $1 bln. till 2020.

The demand for a certain spare part or component also depends on the popularity of a particular type of aircraft. ‘With regards to the regional peculiarities, the most suitable aircraft for the Latin American market is a 70-100-seater. According to the ALTA, today the most popular aircraft types in the region are the A320 (166) and the Boeing 737 family (261). Since the average age of the regional fleet is 20 years, local aircraft require a lot of MRO attention and hence more spare parts and components,’ says Mr. Vorobjovas.

As opposed to the Asian-Pacific market, which, according to Airbus, is set to acquire 42% of all wide-body aircraft in the next 2 decades, the narrow-body ones dominate and will continue to be the most popular aircraft in the Latin American market. Due to a significant number of new aircraft, the Asian-Pacific market will discard almost 5000 airplanes which are currently in use. Since the majority of these airplanes are narrow-bodied, this will create a plentiful spare parts market for narrow-body orientated regions like Latin America.

‘Though modern spares’ market is getting more and more globalized it doesn’t mean that a technician from Rio de Janeiro may open his local ‘yellow pages’ and order an aircraft part from Kuala Lumpur by phone. Language and business culture differences are natural barriers in such cases, left alone the shortage of confidence between the counterparts. Solving such issues can be a much easier task with the help of internet based platforms such as Locatory.com, which brings together trusted suppliers and buyers from all over the world and offers a multilingual environment for the most cost-effective and time saving spare parts solutions. The key point of such projects is to supervise the quality of offered products and services, providing our clients with confidence in each other,’ concludes Vytautas Vorobjovas.

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