Ontic maintains pace of change

After leadership switch at specialist parts-manufacturing firm and opening of new UK MRO hub, long-serving former chief executive vows growth will continue.
Never describe Ontic as a legacy parts manufacturer – at least not within Ontic’s earshot. The UK- and US-based business – which has undergone 12 years of growth during which revenues have soared fivefold to $800 million and staff numbers from 400 to nearly 2,500 – wants to dispel the misconception it specialises in heritage components for veteran platforms.

Ontic, founded in the 1970s, has an unusual business model in the aerospace market. Rather than distributing other companies’ parts or designing its own, it negotiates licences to continue producing components for commercial, military, and business aviation platforms the original intellectual property holder no longer wants to build but which operators and manufacturers rely on to keep their aircraft flying and for their assembly lines.

While some of these products are niche – Ontic offers actuation components for the Boeing B-52 bomber, which entered service in 1955, for instance – the average age of an airframe supported by Ontic is 14 to 16 years, according to the company’s executive chairman and outgoing chief executive Gareth Hall. Many are still in volume production, and around a quarter of Ontic’s production is supplied directly to assembly lines.

The latest manifestation of Ontic’s growth and ambition is a dedicated maintenance, repair and overhaul hub unveiled earlier this month in Tewkesbury in the west of England. The 6,690sq m (72,000sq ft) site – a refurbished former print works in which Ontic has invested $15 million – will see all UK MRO activities relocated under one roof from its nearby factories just outside Cheltenham and Gloucester.

Tewkesbury takes Ontic’s property tally into double figures. Weston, near Miami in Florida, on which Ontic signed a lease in June, is a manufacturing line and joins an MRO centre in neighbouring Miramar, which opened in 2025 – and is effectively a mirror of Tewkesbury. Other US production facilities are in North Carolina, New York State and Chatsworth California, its original business. There is also a small MRO operation in Singapore.

It also comes as the company goes through a major change in leadership with Hall stepping aside as chief executive after a 12-year stint, to be replaced by 20-year Bombardier veteran Jean-Christophe (JC) Gallagher. Gallagher most recently headed aircraft sales and defence activities for the Canadian airframer, but says this role gives him a chance to be a CEO for the first time.

Ontic holds around 200 product licences and “partners with all the OEMs”, according to Hall. Opportunities arise when an original manufacturer wants to invest its resources elsewhere but wants its established product and IP sustained by a reliable custodian. Sometimes Ontic will simply buy the rights to a component; at other times it acquires an entire assembly line or even a business, including premises and employees.

This absorption of entire production facilities was behind its expansion in the UK, where it had a small industrial presence before buying a former Smiths avionics business in Bishops Cleeve near Cheltenham in 2010 from what was then General Electric. It added to that in 2021 when it acquired a hydraulics business from Triumph Group at Gloucestershire airport in nearby Staverton.

Ontic says there is plenty of room to grow within its Tewkesbury operation, which includes a non-destructive testing unit, dark room and clean room and will be fully operating by the turn of the year. Most of its 200 employees will transfer from Staverton and Bishops Cleeve, where they have been carrying out MRO activities. The site also houses a round-the-clock AOG (aircraft on ground) call centre.

Ontic negotiates the rights to produce components from the original manufacturer Source: Ontic

Hall says Ontic’s reputation and ability to manufacture a wide range of aerospace products – effectively under build-to-print arrangements with the original IP holder – as well as supporting them with MRO contracts creates “high barriers of entry” for any would-be competitors. “The OEMs are continually looking at their portfolios and we are the guys they tend to call,” he adds.

Ontic has been majority owned since 2019 by private equity company CVC. It bought the business from BBA Aviation, which also owned private terminal operator Signature, for $1.37 billion. Hall says CVC – which was joined by two additional investors in 2024, including the sovereign wealth fund of Singapore – has “brought renewed vigour to seek out growth” for Ontic.

Hall, who remains in charge of strategy in his new role, promises that “there is still a huge amount of growth to come”, but that Gallagher had been recruited to “bring in some additional thinking and perspectives”. Gallagher, for his part, spent the early summer visiting all the sites, and says: “I’ve shaken 2,000 hands and learned that we have an engaged workforce that really believes in this model.”

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