Rolls-Royce has officially opened Beijing Aero Engine Services Limited, a new maintenance, repair and overhaul joint venture with Air China, expanding its global capacity for servicing large civil aircraft engines as demand grows in China’s widebody aviation market.
The facility, based in Beijing, is the first dedicated Trent engine overhaul site on the Chinese mainland and forms part of Rolls-Royce’s wider global MRO network. It is intended to provide more localised support for operators in China while contributing to the company’s long-term expansion of widebody engine maintenance capacity worldwide.
At the opening ceremony, the Civil Aviation Administration of China granted BAESL its maintenance organisation certificate, formally authorising the facility to carry out professional overhaul work on Trent engines. The event also marked the arrival of the first customer engine into the shop, witnessed by representatives from Rolls-Royce, the Beijing Municipal Government, the British Embassy, Air China, suppliers and industry partners.
Paul Keenan, Director of Commercial Aviation Aftermarket Operations at Rolls-Royce, said the new facility was central to the company’s growth plans. “The opening of BAESL not only supports our long-term growth in the Chinese market, but also contributes to our ambition to significantly increase our global MRO capacity by 2030,” he said.
Keenan highlighted the strategic importance of China to the company, adding: “China is one of the largest and fastest growing widebody markets in the world and is also key to Rolls-Royce. We power more than 500 of China’s in-service commercial aircraft; nearly 20% of our global Trent engines were delivered to China.” He said rising flying hours, new aircraft orders and fleet upgrades were driving increased demand for engine shop visits both in China and globally. Air China described the joint venture as a deepening of its long-standing relationship with Rolls-Royce, noting that the partnership strengthens its position across the aircraft maintenance value chain and improves overall fleet operational support.
BAESL is one of four authorised joint-venture overhaul facilities within the Rolls-Royce global services network, which also includes company-owned maintenance centres, authorised maintenance partners and customer-owned shops. From 2026, the Beijing facility will introduce overhaul capability for Trent 700, Trent XWB-84 and Trent 1000 engines. Capacity is expected to increase steadily, reaching up to 250 engine overhauls per year by 2034.
Bad idea. All technology will be stolen.
If Rolls Royce is to compete at the top it really doesn’t have a lot of choice. Fact is with China US relations as they are the potential for RR in China is probably greater than almost anywhere else especially in a World where the US Administration is literally pressuring all those it can into taking US technology purely as part of a tool and constituent of ant negotiations (we have just seen it with Britain over tech investment put on hold). So for RR the risk is not only acceptable but necessary. Another thing to take into consideration is that replicating the decades long technological progress of a RR engine isn’t simply a matter of breaking it down and copying the bits, all manner of complex metallurgy is involved and other difficult to copy processes that will take years to research and understand and fact is if the Chinese to copy a RR engine then you can’t stop them getting hold of commercial RR Trent engines. The alternative for RR in reality would be going out of business or a decline in competitiveness that will simply hand the market to the US. In these. In these circumstances you don’t have to worry about allowing the Chinese to accumulate your technology and knowledge bank because you won’t be relevant enough to suffer from the loss anyway, indeed even if you survive you will be even less able to compete 20 years down the line being a minnow on the World stage.
Wonder how long it will take for the intellectual Property rights to be stolen? Short term gain for Rolls Royce financially, but it will lead to long term pain…
That long term pain will arrive anyway, it’s just timing. Meanwhile potentially losing much of the 20% of your production (while suffering from US Govt unfair practices elsewhere threatening it) isn’t exactly going to help your prospects of survival current or future. Equally RR is working on another sea change in technology for its engines, small first but feeding into the Trent or its successor and no doubt it will be a long time before those engines are overhauled here, overhaul can also work at different levels, we don’t know the guts of this as yet. But as I say elsewhere overhauling in itself isn’t going to tell you loads about how to design and build a state of the art jet engine that they can’t already manage, taking and dissecting in high tech labs is needed for that and as they have access to these engines anyway if they want to do that then they will be doing it with or without an overhaul facility which at least RR can as they own it keep an eye on. I suspect extra opportunity for China to learn anything especially anything crucial is marginal here at most. The damage not doing it is likely far greater for the Country especially now that we live in a World where the US is intent on destroying competition.
Hoping there are strong constraints on what’s serviced and that its air gapped from RR IT estate!
Exactly!
How much key RR tech will be handled by this new company? Not a great idea to put your cutting edge IP under the noses of those most interested in stealing it.
Likely its cheaper to run, cheaper to employ people, has better tax breaks un like the UK, more of this will happen until not much is left. Any one can see why. Not that i think its a good idea but every thing is too expensive here and companies are there to make money. We have the highest energy costs in the western world add to that buiness taxis, workers rights, national insurence! etc. Just saying.
Well yes but obviously overhauling close to where they are operated from is, once the market there is large enough going to be generally cheaper as well as far less time consuming than carting them around the World. The other thing to remember is that engine manufacturers make most of their money from overhaul and maintenance of in service engines so firstly you don’t want to give that away to local businesses you don’t own or gave an interest in if you can help it while such a facility will as RR sees it encourage more sales of your engines this enabling greater earnings via this facility. Chicken and egg that getting right becomes vital to long term profitability of your company and in this market RR is at a distinct potential advantage it can exploit.
One caveat is that we don’t want to repeat the post war Soviet ‘gift’ scenario but in reality China is already beyond such a scenario and if it’s a threat to the Commercial airliner sector it’s thus for the considerable foreseeable future in the smaller jet sector so little to no overlap in the Trent engine line, has no real direct military concern and RR’s renewed efforts in re entering the smaller commercial engine sector is based on a whole new series of technologies that are not in the Trent series or only gradually creeping in to the latest iterations. Most of the inherent technology in the Trent series is reliant on the, at the time innovative design approach and technology RR developed well over a decade ago. As they have had access to these engines for many years I doubt an overhaul facility is going to add much to their capacity to copy it.
Yes but its simply too expensive to run buiness here, green taxes, NI, buiness rates, corparation tax, cost energy, worker rights looney left bill, No strikes in China! No wind fall taxes. We are pricing our buiness out of work. To pay for people do bugger all but bread and sit about.
Absolutely against this, we’ve been robbed enough by the Chicoms, this will just accelerate the process. See iPhone for more details; you can’t trust the chicoms.
Essential if RR is to sell engines to Chinese airlines.
Ideally it would be a fully RR owned subsidiary but Chinese law requires a partnership with a local company.
No technology risks here, as Chinese airlines already do regular maintenance on the RR engines they own. This facility will do the deep periodic maintenance than is mandated for engines. The money RR will earn will help it to come ahead technologically of anything that can be copied from existing engines.
RR Warp drive engines next then Spock ?