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All Nippon Airways is the largest shareholder of MRO Japan, which conducts maintenance on its Bombardier Q400s and Airbus A320s.
As MRO Japan approaches its 10th anniversary in June, Takashi Shimamura, vice president of business development, talks with Lee Ann Shay about the company’s growth plans and Okinawa’s strategic location.
MRO Japan has many capabilities. What are its busiest lines of business? All Nippon Airways (ANA) is our largest shareholder, with 45%. It operates a unique fleet of aircraft—more than 25 Bombardier Q400s—but there are few maintenance providers for that aircraft in Asia. So we perform heavy maintenance, including C checks, on those aircraft. Our other busiest fleet for maintenance is the Airbus A320.
Is your facility operating at capacity, or do you have resources to do more? About 80% of our slots are full, but 100% of our manpower is sold. That is the constraint for expanding. We’re hiring about 30 people per year, and we have 270 maintenance employees. Integrating new people into the staff takes time, so 30 people annually is the maximum number we take because we have to perform high-quality maintenance at the same time. At this pace, by 2026 or 2027 we should be able to fill all of the hangar slots. But we are planning one more hangar.
When will that hangar be completed? Our target is 2029 or 2030. It will be smaller than our existing hangar. We still need to arrange the money and get approval from our shareholders. But our business is very good, and the shareholders are happy and like the idea of having another hangar.
Many companies around the world are having a hard time recruiting and retaining experienced engineers and mechanics. How are you attracting people? Do you have a training school? We have an in-house training system and school. Our main recruiting targets are people who just graduated from high school. They don’t need aviation experience because we have an excellent in-house training system that offers education from basic to heavy maintenance. We spend a lot of money on training, but then we get people with very good skills.
Because of the global shortage, are other companies trying to hire away your well-trained mechanics? Our company is located in the Okinawa Prefecture, near Okinawa, which is over 1,000 mi. away from Tokyo. We’re closer to Taiwan and Southeast Asia.
We don’t have a difficult time hiring young people to become mechanics. In Japan, the birth rate is decreasing, but in the Okinawa region, it is slightly increasing year over year. Okinawa is a semitropical region, and people are very happy there. The pace is slower, and people have a tendency not to leave their hometowns. They are eager to remain in their home region, and the aviation business is still relatively new there.
MRO Japan will celebrate its 10th anniversary in June. What accomplishments, surprises and challenges stand out over the past decade? I think the biggest success has been establishing the aircraft maintenance business in Okinawa, which was a first. During our first 10 years, the biggest challenge was COVID-19. But it was very difficult for Japanese airlines to outsource heavy maintenance to China or the Southeast Asia region during the pandemic, which led to an influx of work from Japanese airlines. We worked with ANA so there wasn’t MRO outsourced overseas during COVID. Our slots were full of ANA and other Japanese aircraft. This had some good fortune because it allowed us to eliminate accumulated loss four years ahead of schedule.
What are the challenges and opportunities going forward? Passenger-to-freighter conversions and end-of-lease maintenance. My dream is to have a hangar dedicated to those activities.
Is that the hangar you mentioned that could open in 2029 or 2030? Yes. We currently have a four-bay hangar. The next hangar will probably be for narrowbodies.
MRO Japan and Elbe Flugzeugwerke signed a memorandum of understanding in April to perform passenger-to-freighter conversions on Airbus A320/A321 aircraft. Have you started the work? The target to receive the first aircraft and start modification work is in the fourth quarter of 2025.
How long do you expect the first aircraft to take? We expect the first aircraft to take at least eight months, but the global standard is four months. We expect to get to four months after the fifth aircraft.
Are there other partnerships or aftermarket work that MRO Japan aspires to add? We have Japanese heavy and line maintenance customers and foreign line maintenance customers. We don’t have an airline foreign heavy maintenance customer yet, but we’d like to. We are in discussions with several airlines.
Would you ideally like a narrowbody or widebody customer? In Southeast Asia, 75% of the aircraft are narrowbodies and 25% are widebodies, so the biggest potential is for a narrowbody customer. This means a roughly 4,000-km (2,500-mi.) radius from Okinawa includes Singapore and Jakarta. But if we had a business in Osaka or Tokyo, the narrowbody aircraft from Southeast Asia could not reach it directly. Okinawa is a very good place to reach the Southeast Asia narrowbody market.
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