General Electric Co.
GE Aerospace (GE)
Overview
GE Aerospace is the world's largest manufacturer of jet engines, designing, building, and servicing propulsion systems for commercial and military aircraft. Headquartered in Evendale, Ohio (near Cincinnati), the company traces its roots to General Electric's early-20th-century turbosupercharger work and adopted its current standalone identity in 2024, after General Electric completed its multi-year breakup into three independent public companies: GE Aerospace, GE HealthCare, and GE Vernova. GE Aerospace is by far the largest of the three, with roughly $45.9 billion in revenue in fiscal 2025 (up about 18% year over year), net income of about $8.7 billion, and around 57,000 employees worldwide. It trades on the NYSE under the ticker GE — the original General Electric ticker — reflecting its status as the direct continuation of GE's legacy aviation business.
What They Do & How They Make Money
GE Aerospace makes money primarily through a "razor and blade" model built around jet engines. The company often sells new engines to airframers and airlines at relatively thin margins — sometimes near breakeven — because engines are extremely long-lived assets (often flying for 20-30+ years) that require continuous maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) and a steady stream of proprietary spare parts over their operating life. GE Aerospace and its joint ventures capture the far larger, higher-margin profit pool in these aftermarket services: engine overhauls, spare parts sales, and long-term service agreements with airlines and militaries. This is reflected in the company's revenue mix, where services revenue (roughly $30 billion in FY2025) considerably outweighs new equipment sales (roughly $13 billion), underscoring how the installed base of GE-powered aircraft functions as a recurring, high-margin annuity business. A significant share of commercial engine production runs through CFM International, a 50/50 joint venture with France's Safran Aircraft Engines, whose CFM56 and LEAP engine families power the majority of Airbus and Boeing narrow-body aircraft in service today. On the military side, GE Aerospace supplies engines and propulsion technology directly to the U.S. and allied governments, generating revenue through both new production contracts and long-term sustainment agreements.
Business Segments
GE Aerospace reports two primary operating segments:
- Commercial Engines & Services — The larger segment, encompassing the design, manufacture, and MRO of jet engines and spare parts for commercial airframes, business aviation, and aeroderivative applications (including through the CFM International joint venture). This segment benefits from GE's massive installed base — tens of thousands of engines in service worldwide — generating durable, recurring aftermarket revenue as airlines fly aircraft for decades.
- Defense & Propulsion Technologies — Designs, manufactures, and services engines, avionics, and power systems for governments and militaries worldwide, as well as commercial airframers. This segment also includes component businesses such as Avio Aero (Italian aerospace components), Unison (engine controls), Dowty Propellers, and Colibrium Additive (additive manufacturing), producing turboprop engines, transmissions, turbines, combustors, and controls.
Across both segments, GE Aerospace's overall revenue splits roughly two-thirds services/aftermarket to one-third new equipment, with the services mix carrying substantially higher margins — the company's overall FY2025 operating margin was above 20%.
Competitors
GE Aerospace's competitive landscape is concentrated among a small number of very large aerospace propulsion companies:
- Commercial engines: The dominant rivalry is with Pratt & Whitney (a division of RTX Corporation, formerly Raytheon Technologies) and Rolls-Royce Holdings (UK), both of which compete for engine placement on Airbus and Boeing narrow-body and wide-body aircraft. Through the CFM joint venture, GE effectively competes alongside Safran against Pratt & Whitney's geared turbofan engines on the Airbus A320neo family, and against Rolls-Royce on wide-body platforms.
- Defense: Competitors include Pratt & Whitney/RTX, Rolls-Royce, and, in some military propulsion segments, defense-focused divisions of companies like Honeywell.
- Broader aerospace/defense: While not direct engine competitors, large integrated aerospace and defense primes such as Boeing, Airbus, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman are important customers and occasional partners rather than rivals, but they shape the competitive dynamics of the industry GE Aerospace serves.
Competitive Position
GE Aerospace's competitive moat is exceptionally strong and durable. Jet engine manufacturing has extraordinarily high barriers to entry — enormous R&D costs, decades-long certification cycles, deep metallurgical and manufacturing expertise, and the need for a proven safety and reliability track record — meaning realistically only three or four companies worldwide can compete at the top of the market. Once an engine is selected for an aircraft platform, it typically remains the exclusive or primary power plant for that aircraft's entire multi-decade production run, and airlines that have invested in maintenance infrastructure, spare-parts inventory, and pilot/mechanic training for a given engine family are strongly incentivized to stay within that ecosystem — creating very high switching costs. The CFM/LEAP engine family's dominant position on the best-selling Airbus A320neo and Boeing 737 MAX narrow-body programs gives GE Aerospace and Safran an enormous and growing installed base that will generate decades of high-margin aftermarket revenue.
Key risks include the cyclicality of commercial aviation (sensitive to fuel prices, air travel demand, and airline financial health), supply chain constraints that have periodically limited engine production and delivery rates industry-wide, and the technical and execution risk inherent in developing next-generation, more fuel-efficient engine technology (including GE's work on open-fan and hybrid-electric propulsion concepts for future narrow-body aircraft). Geopolitical dynamics also matter: defense budgets and export controls affect the Defense & Propulsion Technologies segment, and GE's reliance on the Safran joint venture, while a major strength, also means some strategic decisions are shared rather than unilateral. Despite these risks, GE Aerospace's scale, installed base, and technological leadership give it a durable, wide-moat position as the world's leading aircraft engine maker.