Story ID: 
New Rotorcraft 2015
By: Mark Huber
Caption: The civil market continues to slow, but OEMs look to the future.
Word Count: 591
In early January oil traded below $50 per barrel for the first time since 2009 and the U.S. dollar was wiping the floor with most of the competitive currencies around the globe. Just one month earlier, most industry analysts were putting a brave face on all of this relative to its impact on the world civil helicopter market, while the OEMs themselves remained sanguine or speechless or a little of both. The euphoria surrounding the new helicopter market a year ago has degraded to nervous optimism amidst the discovery of coughing canaries in the coal mine. The party might not be over, but the attendees are nursing their cocktails and speaking more softly. And nobody is dancing.

About the time helicopter lessor Milestone Aviation was being acquired by Gecas last October, Bell was acknowledging that the first flight of its new super-medium 525 twin would be delayed into 2015. Meanwhile, much of the forward number-crunching related to the assumed price of oil is out the window, as could be the helicopter services demand forecasts by the offshore energy industry. Fortunately, many new deep-water projects are still profitable at $50 per barrel, but not much less than that. Unfortunately, a good bit of that activity is off the Brazilian coast and controlled by majority state-owned Petrobras, already the world’s most indebted oil company ($139 billion) and currently mired in a multibillion-dollar corruption scandal. Petrobras’s murky finances could limit its access to needed global capital for further exploration, while it continues to struggle to meet production targets.

Overall, recent sales numbers already are declining. New civil helicopter sales collectively attributed to AgustaWestland, Airbus, Bell, Enstrom and Robinson by the General Aviation Manufacturers Association (GAMA) for the first nine months of 2014 were down 32.4 percent compared with the same period a year earlier. “It was brutal all over,” one OEM spokesman said of 2014 sales. Perhaps more interesting is to see what is selling the best in this down market: legacy products. AW’s best-seller remains the AW139 medium twin; at Airbus it’s the AS350B3e and EC130 singles and the EC135 light twin; at Bell it’s the 407 heavy single and 429 light twin. Industry billings for the first nine months of last year dropped more than 20 percent compared with the same period in 2013, according to GAMA.

And it could be worse if not for a combination of some heavy discounting and cost containment going on, reflected in lower margins at both Airbus and United Technologies’ (UTC) Sikorsky, with the former posting a thin profit margin of just 6.4 percent, down half a point from 2013. The latter’s margins have dipped below 10 percent for the first time in recent memory, rekindling speculation that UTC is getting ready to cut it loose. New UTC CEO Greg Hayes gave stock analysts a mixed message in December, telling them, “We’re not going to sell Sikorsky…but the fact is, we’re going to take a hard look at the portfolio [of UTC companies] and do what’s right.”

For Sikorsky and for other OEMs, “doing what’s right” in the short-term for the civil market could involve lowering expectations, slowing new programs in progress, shelving more long-term ambitions until the world energy demand and markets stabilize and/or recover, taking on more partners and even looking at consolidation down the road. Meanwhile, do not be surprised if some schedule adjustments are announced before or at Heli-Expo in March as eroding oil prices send a chill through the new helicopter market.