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To be a better company every day

Sponsored Content | March 18, 2019

Estimated reading time 6 minutes, 1 seconds.

A little more than a year ago, Precision Aviation Group (PAG) opened a new 3,500-square-foot (325-square-meter) maintenance facility at Seletar Airport in Singapore and saw it do very well in its first full year of operation.

That facility, located near the island nation’s northern coast, provides 24/7 inventory-supported maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) to helicopter fleets in the Asia-Pacific region, along with a suite of other services.

“That kind of personifies who we are and what we do,” said David Mast, president and chief executive officer of PAG. “One of our core philosophies is ‘Global Presence, Local Support.’ It allows us to combine all the capabilities of all our locations, but be local where our customers are. And it really resonates in the rotorcraft space.”

PAG is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, but has nine locations around the world, providing round-the-clock MRO support to both rotary- and fixed-wing customers.

The new Singapore facility is expected to become a U.S. Federal Aviation Administration repair station in 2019, the latest stage of an ambitious growth strategy aimed at making PAG a better company by expanding its global reach.

“We want to be a better company every day,” said Mast. “That’s in terms of employer of choice; that’s in terms of efficiency, good stewards and a growing, successful business. And part of that philosophy is really focusing on how do we better serve our customers.”

PAG saw record throughput at its maintenance facilities in 2018, with a 15-percent year-over-year increase across the board. It also vastly expanded its rotable pool, spending US$2 million on parts in the last six months of the year alone. PAG’s revenues grew to over $150 million in 2018 and Mast’s goal is to post at least $300 million in annual revenue by 2025.

“We want to be the supplier of choice to people that operate turbine-powered aircraft–fixed- and rotary-wing–and to have a growing global presence,” said Mast. “There’s a lot of white space, globally, to expand our footprint.”

A driving force behind PAG’s growth has been the financial resources of private equity partners, now backed by GenNx360 Capital Partners, a New York based private equity firm that invested in PAG last year.

GenNx360 was co-founded by Lloyd G. Trotter, former vice chair of General Electric and former president and CEO of GE Industrial.

“Having a very strong financial partner that [understands] our space, like GenNx360, is invaluable,” said Ketan Desai, VP of sales and marketing for PAG. “They’ve been very quick to say, ‘Go do it.’ If we want to buy $2 million in rotable components or an aircraft–we have a quick call and they approve it. So, that allows us to have a competitive edge against any of our competition that doesn’t have that flexibility or the capital available to them within a 24-hour period. We’re really excited about being partnered with GenNx . . . they’ve been great partners for us and our business.”

Another major development in the last year was PAG’s new status as an authorized distributor and service center for UTAS/Collins Aerospace helicopter servos in North America.

“Having the ability to own inventory that certain OEMs may not always have readily available is something that we are always looking for,” said Desai.

“We want to continue to provide a level of service to customers that nobody else does, consistently day in and day out,” he added. “That’s what drives this business . . . the level of service is what differentiates us from all of our competition.”

Though PAG was formed in 1996, its roots in the helicopter industry stretch back even further, to the founding of its predecessor company, Precision Heliparts (PHP), in 1993. PHP remains a key brand within PAG, with locations in Atlanta; Brisbane, Australia; Lafayette, Louisiana; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Singapore; and Vancouver, British Columbia.

“A large portion of our business is dedicated exclusively to the support of rotary-wing aircraft,” noted Desai.

In the year ahead, PAG plans to follow the path it has been on for the last quarter-century, bolstered by a larger capital budget that allows it to supercharge some of its goals. PAG will focus on building efficiencies into the business, developing an integrated used-serviceable-material program and expanding its designated-engineering-representative repair presence, said Mast.

“We are a business that never says no to our customers,” he said. “A lot of people say that, but we are at 24/7/365 global business, and when we say that, we mean it.

“When you have your best salespeople here on a Saturday night at two in the morning, shipping parts to our customers, [it’s] because we believe it’s our job each and every day to provide those parts to the utmost efficiency to keep our customers’ aircraft in the air. It’s not something that’s just words on a page. It’s what we speak and believe.”

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