CASE STUDIES
Case studies and testimonials from a sample of Cirium customers
“We use Cirium’s fleet and values data widely across the business. With the acquisition of AWAS in 2017, our owned, managed and committed portfolio grew by almost 300 aircraft; both businesses had been long term subscribers to Cirium and with that increased scale, a reliable basis for risk analysis and modelling for investment, remarketing and trading activity has become increasingly important. We trust in Cirium’s understanding of the market and their ability to deliver valuable solutions to the leasing community.”
Michael Dowling, chief risk officer
Development Bank of Japan (DBJ) has been relying on Cirium’s expertise since 2011 to achieve their objective of building a best in class aviation finance department.
To achieve this objective DBJ needed insight on the following areas:
Cirium provided several workshops and advisory reports to help DBJ’s team of finance professionals fully grasp the complexities of aircraft value behavior, the used aircraft marketplace, risk management, best practices in financing and leasing and the competitive landscape.
The goal eight years later remains the same, to ensure their team of analysts and investment professionals have access to data and analytics that they can trust every day.
The challenge
As a newcomer to the market in 2011, it was vital that DBJ partnered with a data and analytics organization that would enable them to build a world class aviation finance team. A core component of achieving this goal was in helping them to understand the complexities of the market and build frameworks that would provide a longevity of analysis to support their requirements. The prospect of transforming DBJ into a global powerhouse in aviation finance required a solution that was truly global. It needed to include values of aviation assets worldwide and appropriate commentaries and consultancy face to face time to fully understand the complexities of this market. In addition, DBJ required a solution that would ensure they could conduct higher risk transactions with confidence. To achieve their goal, DBJ needed access to industry news, schedules, asset values, fleet information and a professional advisory team to assist with any query.
The solution
The project began in 2011 with a consultancy study led by Cirium’s consultancy team, Ascend by Cirium, to help DBJ understand the reasons behind investing in the aviation sector. The results of this research, known internally by DBJ staff as the ‘bible of their business’ provide vital information on the life of an aircraft type. In addition, it has helped DBJ to develop a risk management system that acts as the foundation for their aviation investment team.
To ensure a constant flow of knowledge on the market remained, DBJ needed accurate real time information on developments across the global fleet. Cirium provides DBJ with a suite of solutions that have a friendly user interface and provide data and analytics by an aircraft MSN.
Cirium’s fleets, values and schedules data sets made it easy to manage large volumes of information with little resource. The aviation finance team can now quickly and via an in-depth source, view the size of a customer’s fleet, the midlife, full-life or monthly lease rate of an aviation asset by MSN. Once this process has been complete the team can additionally view the routes, ASKS and capacity statistics for the client’s routes and customers. Therefore, providing them with a thorough view of their customers and prospects activities to ensure their investment plans are focusing on the most relevant areas.
Here after, to ensure continual improvement DBJ began to investigate engines as an additional investment portfolio. The process of asset risk transactions of this nature required information on the technicalities of the asset that were different to airframe values. The Ascend by Cirium ISTAT appraisers helped DBJ to provide extra knowledge on the life of the engine and the operator history of the specific asset.
To help DBJ meet their goal of building a world class team, Cirium recognised the need for regular client support. If a member of the DBJ team is unsure on a market development or aircraft value, they can reach out to the Ascend by Cirium consultants and receive a reply in a consistently timely manner.
GVH Aerospace is a global aerospace company that provides aftermarket aircraft modifications and associated services. For the past 25 years they have provided a range of solutions to airlines, lessors and helicopter operators from simple lease redelivery modifications to complete cabin reconfiguration, electrical/ avionics system installation and special mission/aeromedical conversions. They believe in helping their customers achieve competitiveness and meet their business objectives by tackling the challenges associated with managing aircraft assets, including differentiating services, responding to rapidly changing market demands, complying with regulatory requirements, minimizing costs and maximizing return. Their goal is to continue to provide innovative and cost-effective solutions to all their customers globally.
The Challenge
GVH Aerospace provides services across both Airbus and Boeing aircraft – 70% of their work is with single-aisle commercial aircraft – as well as business jets and helicopters. They also receive requests to provide services to regional aircraft depending on the age of aircraft. The sales team at GVH Aerospace are looking to take the marketing and sales efforts to the next level, beyond traditional customer and market research that relies on painstaking identification of potential customers using public information and aircraft registry. To achieve the level of marketing and sales success requires developing deeper macro insights into the target markets and deeper micro insights into individual customers, developing the ability to identify potential customer pain points, fleet utilization and planning considerations.
The Solution
To inform their strategic decision making, GVH Aerospace looked into into a variety of analytics solutions to gain an understanding of:
Gaining more in-depth knowledge of how an operator plans, structures, operates and finances their fleet of aircraft allows GVH Aerospace to discern their primary needs and value adding strategy. As a result, the sales team can tailor the solution offering to the customer, and the company can make better business decisions. “It was only after some trials that we settled on using Fleets Analyzer as our preferred platform,” said Cher Min Teo, Chief of Strategy and Marketing at GVH Aerospace. “We were comparing the quality of the data and the accuracy based on the customers that we knew of and then we arrived at the decision to stay with Cirium℠ Fleets Analyzer. A high level of accuracy is important but the main advantage is that all the Commercial, Helicopter and Business Jets are all accessible via a single interface where we can access data on aircraft types, operators and geographic regions that we are interested in. We have a single source of the data of the global fleet. This allows us to refine our plans, and when combined with more targeted customer and sales research, we are able to gain much deeper customer and industry insights than before.” Fleets Analyzer allows GVH Aerospace to identify macro industry trends for different aircraft types and in different regions, and perform deep dives into specific targeted customers to understand their business and requirements.
Thanks to a reliable, comprehensive fleets database, GVH Aerospace can
Unforeseen turbulence, particularly clear-air turbulence (CAT), adds millions of dollars worth of unplanned expenses to the global airline industry. Turbulence events may cause damage to the structure of aircraft, physically injure flight crew and passengers, impair flight crew performance, damage cabin interiors and divert aircraft off their optimal flight paths. As a result of climate change, severe clear air turbulence encounters are projected to increase by up to 140%, therefore a platform for real-time sensing, monitoring and alerting of pilots and flight dispatchers to these turbulence events is required by the global airline community.
Clear-air turbulence is difficult to avoid as it cannot be detected by aircraft radar systems, but it can be sensed by on-board sensors when an aircraft flies through these invisible “air pockets”. These sensor readings are passed through algorithms which compute the intensity of turbulence and transmit their values to ground-based servers. A number of airlines already gather this information and use it in their own flight dispatch systems, however, until today, there has been no way for airlines to share this information with each other.
IATA created the Turbulence Aware program after 96% of respondents to an IATA feasibility study – including airlines, air navigation service providers, and militaries – stated that they required real-time, objective data about the location and severity of turbulence. Turbulence Aware will collect, anonymize, and consolidate aircraft-sensed turbulence data from multiple airline operators onto one cloud-based platform that will be made available to all airlines and will provide flight operations departments and pilots with real-time situational awareness of clear-air turbulence events around the world. A governance board comprising of IATA and some of the world’s most innovative airlines (Delta, Southwest, United, American Airlines, Air France, Qantas, Cathay Pacific, Japan Airlines, China Southern, Aer Lingus, EasyJet, Lufthansa, Swiss and WestJet) has been established to drive the vision and roadmap of the Turbulence Aware platform on behalf of the global airline community.
After an extensive competitive evaluation, IATA selected Cirium Sky (formerly Snowflake Software) to build, host and manage the cloud-based Turbulence Aware data management platform using Cirium Sky for AirOps. The Cirium Sky managed cloud solution receives, anonymizes, processes, stores and distributes turbulence data from each participating airline’s fleet of aircraft in real-time. This turbulence data is easily accessible to airline flight dispatch systems and pilot applications via simple-to-consume APIs or a browser-based turbulence viewer. In addition, the Cirium Sky platform serves as an archive of turbulence data for post-flight analyses, academic research and refinement of turbulence forecast models.
“We’ve used Cirium’s fleet and values data since our inception. Having initially focused on the commercial aircraft space, more recently our focus has been primarily in helicopter leasing through purchase and leaseback with selected operators, and placement of a significant number of OEM orders. The Fleets Analyzer database is integral to a number of our pre-deal processes enabling us to rapidly analyse and segment markets and extrapolate data which complements our view of the market. We use both Cirium’s online valuation and desktop appraisal services extensively. Cirium’s experience and understanding of the helicopter space is very well regarded and we look forward to further developments in their offerings to our market.”
Georgio Colombi, commercial manager
Magellan Aviation Group has become a leader in the aftermarket sales of engine and aircraft product and services. They support three segments of the air transport industry: commuter/regional turbo-prop, regional jet, and commercial narrow- and wide-body. Since its foundation in 2000, Magellan Aviation Group is serving more than 775 customers in 80 countries.
Problem
In the current competitive environment, Magellan Aviation Group has found it increasingly more challenging to lease and trade engines alongside making a desired return, so it usually looks for alternative ways to grow. By having a range of current and forecasted fleet data, Magellan Aviation Group can be informed and proactive enough to gain an advantage in securing new business. A key factor in Magellan Aviation Group meeting its strategic growth targets is the success of its global Commercial Team, who has responsibility for finding new deals. Magellan Aviation Group has a very experienced team located between North Carolina, Florida, Ireland, and Singapore. The Commercial Team originates deals in the market with airlines, spending much of their time on the road networking and meeting clients or prospects. However, in such a competitive market, where other lessors often accept the lowest possible bid, the Commercial Team needs to:
The Solution
it is vital that the Commercial Team keeps abreast of market developments and reacts quickly to opportunities, ahead of the competition. When on the road, the Commercial Team needs to create meeting briefs quickly. It is important that the information in these briefs is accurate and up-to-date as it helps substantiate client discussions and allows the team to benchmark information provided by clients. The Magellan Aviation Group Commercial Team relies heavily on fleets information in Cirium℠ Fleets Analyzer to provide a snapshot of the portfolio of an airline or lessor. The team generates information directly from Fleets Analyzer to see the prospect’s fleet size, who is leasing which aircraft, and when their leases will expire. With many meetings to prepare for, in a short space of time when travelling the Commercial Team finds it very useful that the information in Fleets Analyzer can be exported to Excel and a detailed report completed within minutes.
Magellan Aviation Group chose to use Fleets Analyzer as its fleets research tool because it has found Fleets Analyzer to be the most accurate and complete data available. Magellan Aviation Group has evaluated fleets data from other providers and found Cirium to provide better coverage and accuracy. Magellan Aviation Group has also found that Cirium’s fleets database is the industry standard, with most lessors using it as a benchmark view of the world’s fleet.
Mitsubishi Aircraft Corporation is a Japanese company dedicated to the development, sales and support of the Mitsubishi Regional Jet (MRJ90 and MRJ70). The MRJ90 and MRJ70 are still in development and the organization is working hard to build a strong order book.
The Challenge
To improve their knowledge and understanding of the industry, the marketing, sales and analysis functions required an up-to-date, reliable and easy-to access fleets database and a trustworthy news solution. It was essential that the information could power detailed market, competitor and commercial analysis that would help save the strategic marketing team time. Mitsubishi’s strategic marketing function produces regular market analysis to clarify the order books of its main competitors. The 70-90-seat regional jet market is competitive, with Bombardier, Embraer and ATR all producing rival aircraft. It is vital that fleet information is accessible in a timely manner to support the future commercial developments of the MRJ program. It is important that the strategic marketing function has access to authoritative fleet data in order to support existing sales campaigns. The team required a solution that would provide order numbers, backlog numbers, cancellation data, and average age of aircraft in the regional jet market. The impact of not providing the commercial team with accurate figures could have a detrimental effect on sales of the MRJ program.
The Solution
To understand the market and make sure their plans were accurate, Mitsubishi Aircraft Corporation chose to subscribe to Cirium Fleets Analyzer; an Insights dashboard; and to engage the Ascend by Cirium team to provide independent residual valuation of the MRJ90 and MRJ70. Today, Fleets Analyzer continues to improve Mitsubishi Aircraft Corporation’s ability to present detailed research on the regional jet market.
NATS, the UK’s leading provider of air traffic control services, handles 2.2 million flights and 220 million passengers in UK airspace each year. Originally collaborating in the 2013 EUROCONTROL SWIM Master Class, Cirium and NATS developed a prototype to demonstrate how reduced stack holding over London Heathrow could provide both economic and environmental savings. The successful project, now fully operational, uses Cirium Sky to manage, store and publish arrival sequence and temporal information to the adjacent control centres. In its first few years, it has saved more than 8,000 tonnes of CO2 and £1.65 million in airline and ground costs.
“As Senior Sales Manager at Nordea, I find Cirium’s Value Analyzer and Online Portfolios Fixed Wing very helpful when it comes to managing asset risk and get comprehensive and accurate aviation data on airlines and aircraft.”
Daniel Nordberg, senior relationship manager
“ORIX Aviation has a portfolio of over 230 owned and managed aircraft, mostly made up of current and new generation 737 and A320 family aircraft plus a number of modern technology twin-aisle aircraft. We’ve been a long-term subscriber to Cirium’s Fleets, Values and Dashboard; the data and reports are used extensively within a variety of Risk Analysis, Pricing and Sales & Marketing/Trading functions and our use of Cirium’s products has been of great importance for us to have achieved our substantial growth to date. Reliable and detailed market information as provided by Cirium is critical in helping us identify and evaluate new business opportunities, be that acquisitions, leases or sales of aircraft.”
Rob Asher, head of credit risk
“Cirium Fleets & Values data has been instrumental in supporting TrueNoord through an important growth phase, where we have rapidly built a portfolio of 30 regional jets and turboprops over 18 months. This requires us to have a clear understanding of the liquidity and competitive dynamics in that space, and also to demonstrate the investment merits of regional aircraft to both TrueNoord’s current equity partners and those we are targeting. Ciriums’ reputation and granularity of data is a source of confidence for us, as well as their approach to some complex modelling challenges around returns from leasing. TrueNoord has significant expansion plans and we hope to broaden the relationship as we continue to grow.”
Anne-Bart Tieleman, CEO, TrueNoord Regional Aircraft Leasing