ExecuJet Haite Prepares For Growth In Asia’s Bizav Market

SINGAPORE—With business aviation in the Asia Pacific region on the upswing, MRO provider ExecuJet Haite is expanding quickly to meet demand.

In 2024, ExecuJet Haite, which operates an MRO facility in Tianjin, expanded with a new purpose-built MRO facility at Beijing Daxing International Airport and adding business jet ground handling services at Beijing Capital International and a new 149,500 ft.² MRO facility at Subang Airport near downtown Kuala Lumpur for line maintenance.

“Certainly, Southeast Asia is growing,” ExecuJet Haite’s general manager, Paul Desgrosseilliers, said during opening day of the Business Aviation Asia Forum & Expo in Singapore. “Southeast Asia is always a hot market. Singapore in particular seems to be growing.”

He remembers about 15 years ago when there used to be three or four business jets in Singapore. “It was next to nothing,” Desgrosselliers says. “Today, we have 83 business jets in Singapore. The Singapore market has just exploded.”

For one, the economy has “taken off in Singapore,” he says, with increased business investment. And it’s not only Singapore. Thailand and Indonesia grew in 2024, so has Vietnam. Pre-pandemic, there were no business jets in Vietnam. Today, there are nine, he says.

“Every market is growing in Southeast Asia,” Desgrosselliers says. “If we go take a step back to China, we hope that the market will stabilize; we hope.”

After several years of significant declines, the business jet fleet in Hong Kong grew in 2024, going from 55 to 56.

“I think in mainland China, we can look to Hong Kong hopefully as a bit of a bell weather,” he says. “Hopefully, we’ll be stabilizing in mainland China, but it’s really tough to say.”

However, several Gulfstream G700s will be delivered into China at the end of this year, Desgroseilliers says. “So, there’s new aircraft coming.” And OEMS are doing demo flights and showing aircraft to positive reactions.

But there are unknowns.

“I don’t know when China is going to fully turn to where we start taking more deliveries than aircraft leaving,” he says. Chinese companies are investing inside China but they’re also making investments all over the world. A lot of the investments are in Southeast Asia, including in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, and they’re moving aircraft to match.

One reason the company decided to exhibit at BAAFex is to overcome the perception that China has limited maintenance capabilities available, Desgrosselliers says.

“We were always compared to Singapore,” he says. “But Singapore had a 30-year head start compared to China.”

For Execujet Haite, the company projects significant growth in 2025 following a 20% growth in 2024 compared to the previous year. The company projects that same level of growth in 2025 with the added facilities, followed by 5% to 10% growth per year in the following years.

Eventually, the company forecasts that its Beijing facility will equalize and then surpass its Tianjin site, one because of the sheer size of its hangar, which doubles hangar space in Tianjin while having equal capabilities, Desgrosseilliers says.

The MRO also has a high reputation with regulators in terms of safety and quality of work, which eases the growth path.

While the businesses in Tianjin and Beijing are set up separately to comply with government regulations, they essentially operate as one unit with the sharing of staff and specialized tooling, Desgrosseilliers said.

“If the business in Beijing, if we have certain inspections there, the engineers that are specialized on Gulfstreams will go to Daxing and do that inspection; if a Falcon is in Tianjin, then the Falcon guys go to Tianjin,” Desgrosseilliers said. “It’s very good where you can direct resources. It works out well for us.”

The company employs 65 among the sites, including 26 maintenance mechanics or engineers.