AHGUIDE
Finding new ways How COVID changed the spare parts business
Over the last two and a half years, the pandemic turned every aspect of our lives upside down, creating many new challenges and opportunities. One of the most long-lasting effects is, without doubt, the still ongoing disruption of the global supply and demand of production slots that ultimately led to a shortage in production capacity for many components and subcomponents regardless of their complexity, value, or material composition. Therefore we talked with Matthias Kortschak, the Accountable Manager of PRIMUS AERO, about the changes in the parts business during the past months. Matthias, since the pandemic is slowly losing its impact on people's lives and restrictions recede around the globe, how much was the parts business affected by that? Fortunately, our parts business was not severely affected by the consequences of the pandemic. Although we have faced various ups and downs since March 2020, our services were in high demand, not only in the parts department. For example, caused by a rather immediate effect of the pandemic -travel restrictions- many operators took the opportunity to advance the maintenance of their anyway grounded aircraft. That caused an immediate increase in demand for maintenance services -and therefore also parts. While many businesses or entire industries struggled for weeks with closures, that was indeed not the case for aircraft maintenance providers and their suppliers.
Equally profiting from the situation were shipping companies facing a record high demand due to online shopping. However, those businesses were unprepared to cope with that massive number of shipments. That ultimately led to longer shipping and lead times, higher shipment costs, and so on. Although the situation has improved over the last year, it is still not "back to normal”. Especially not on intercontinental shipments as the logistical backbone of many shipping companies was partly eliminated: the available cargo on passenger flights. With the pandemic causing many airlines even to reduce their fleet -including permanently retiring parts of their fleet such as the A380- the worldwide cargo capacity took a deep dive from which it only recovered very slowly. The attempt to use cargo ships and accept significantly longer transit times to deal with the backlog of shipments did not work out well, given the ports' lack of capacity. On top of that, Brexit forced many suppliers to restructure themselves, especially concerning customs clearance, resulting in many new challenges. Although we found new ways to get parts from A to B, those new ways might be more expensive than those we could use pre-pandemic. What are the significant differences now, compared to the situation in, e.g., 2019? As I already mentioned, to summarize the situation: Higher shipment costs, longer lead times -and what used to be express shipping services are generally non-existing: In 2019, it was an unwritten rule that parts shipments within Europe never took longer than one day, and shipments coming from the US did
