GJC: Balanced Bizjet Market To Approach $40B in 2025

Global Jet Capital, releasing its business jet forecast, sees steady continued growth in the next five years with transactions nearing $40 billion in 2025. Further, GJC anticipates this growth to continue fairly steadily over the next five years, averaging about 4.2% for preowned and 2.7% annually for new-production jets.

“We’re seeing a very good and balanced market,” GJC CEO Vivek Kaushal told AIN. “Clearly, we turned the page coming out of Covid, and the story has just continued to build in this really nice and steady fashion.”

In all, GJC forecasts that total market volume will reach 3,383 in 2025 and 3,778 by 2029. This compares with a unit volume of 3,125 in 2024. The high level over the decade occurred with the post-Covid bump in 2021, when used aircraft transactions surged, pushing the overall transaction volume to 3,963.

Preowned transactions will account for 2,604 aircraft this year, growing to 2,926 in 2029, GJC forecasts. New-production deliveries, meanwhile, are anticipated to reach 779 this year, up from 746 in 2024, growing to 852 in 2029. 

As for dollar volume, the market is anticipated to total $38.7 billion this year, over half of which, $20.1 billion, will involve new deliveries. This reflects the balance weighing toward larger jets for new versus used. Likewise, in 2029, the total transaction volume is anticipated to reach $44.2 billion, with new deliveries accounting for $23.5 billion of that.

“If you look at new deliveries of aircraft, we bottomed out at $14.2 billion in 2020, and that went up gradually to $19 billion by 2024. This year, we think we’re going to be at about $20 billion, and so if you look at that trough to peak ratio of about 50% or a little under 50%, that’s actually a Goldilocks kind of ratio from our perspective,” Kaushal said.

He pointed to the Covid-constrained production environment and noted the industry’s ability to bounce back at the rate it has. “I think that speaks volumes of the maturation of the industry,” he said.

A key driver of this, on the new delivery side, is backlogs that are 62.2% greater than in 2019, topping $50 billion, with most models sold out by more than two years. “All of that just goes to tell us that there’s stability in this dynamic,” he said.

Kaushal also believes this will be sustained, doubting that the industry would undergo a similar bubble burst as in the 2008 and 2009 timeframe. He pointed to the market before the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009, saying it was much more “frothy.” During that time, production rates doubled from 2003 to 2008, and book-to-bill rates of 2:1 to 2.5:1.

Today, those ratios are much more level at nearly 1:1. “You’ve got an industry that’s just in this really nice stable dynamic; they’re coming up with new models, which is exciting, and you’ve got a demand base that’s very grounded,” Kaushal maintained. “You’ve got large corporations, you’ve got ultra-high-net-worth individuals who are looking years out and placing orders. These aren’t people who are making a spur-of-the-moment purchase.”

That maturity is now playing out in the preowned market. Young aircraft, those less than five years old, and anything “high quality” have no trouble selling, he said. But it is occurring in an organized, stable way:“We’re not seeing like bidding wars, and at the same time we’re seeing very prompt cycle times.”

When GJC gets a five-year-old aircraft at the end of the lease, “it’s usually gone 60 days into our marketing process. We’re seeing just a really strong market.”

He noted that the market should push past $40 billion in 2026 or 2027 in total transactional sales. New deliveries should top 800 aircraft next year, Kaushal note, with growth across all segments of the business aviation market and particularly for charter.

Speaking to the balance, now OEMs are expected to deliver somewhere around 3.5% of the installed base, compared with what was about 8% in 2008.

“When you compare just straight numbers, there’s no comparison, from our perspective, given the utilization picture, given the global nature of the installed base now. The current production levels are not only sustainable, but longer term, they have some upside in them.”

He also noted that in the early 2000s, aircraft purchase agreements were assignable, creating an active market in trading delivery positions. “You had people placing speculative orders just because they felt they could trade those orders for a profit. That’s no longer the case. That frothy sort of trading market no longer exists.”

Kaushal maintained that this was a key driver of the slew of order cancellations. Today, the cancellations are more one-off. “You wouldn’t see anything on the scale of what happened back then.”

In addition, the supply chain is metering how fast companies can ramp up. “I think the supply chain is going to be a meaningful constraint. There are, of course, supply-chain issues, but they’re not as widespread as they were three years ago.”

As for current market trends, GJC has seen a shift in customers realizing they need to long-term plan for an acquisition. “Your delivery lead times are such that you can’t expect to walk up and walk out with a brand-new aircraft. In fact, you won’t see that aircraft for a while,” he said. “Even for a preowned, if somebody really wants an aircraft of a certain pedigree—certain vintage, performance, and interior—it just takes time, and it takes clarity of what you want. So we see this becoming a much more planning-driven process. Our clients are engaging with us early for financing and pre-delivery payments.”

GJC is also seeing “a tremendous response to our operating lease product. It’s getting more and more traction outside of the U.S. as people realize the value of completely hedging the residual value risk, and then also making the fixed lease payments, becoming a highly predictable way of managing the aircraft ownership cycle.”