DAE Engineering Revenue Halves to $76 Million as Middle East Conflict Keeps European MRO Customers Away
Why It MattersMRO capacity in conflict-adjacent regions depends on customers' willingness to send aircraft and crews, so idle hangars can coexist with healthy lessor earnings, as DAE's split results show.
What happened
DAE Engineering, the maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) business that owns Joramco, reported revenue of $76 million for the quarter ending Sept. 30, down from $156 million in the same period of 2025.
Firoz Tarapore, CEO of parent company Dubai Aerospace Enterprise Ltd. (DAE), said European clients are still unable to send their aircraft and personnel for normal maintenance. He said customers will not feel safe doing so until the conflict subsides in its entirety, and that the engineering business will continue to underperform until then.
Before the Iran war, Joramco had expected this year to build on its post-pandemic revenue growth. In 2025 it completed a new hangar with five additional heavy maintenance lines, bringing total capacity to 24 heavy maintenance lines across six aircraft hangars. Some of those hangars now sit idle because of the conflict.
Overall DAE revenues continued to rise, helped by greater scale following its acquisition of Macquarie AirFinance. Quarterly lease revenue increased to $1.3 billion from $1.1 billion a year earlier. Asked about a possible softening of the leasing market amid pressure on airline profitability and consumer spending, Tarapore said DAE was not seeing much weakening in its leasing business and that supply and demand in the narrowbody market remained "well calibrated."
Industry impact & what to watch
The two halves of DAE's results show that different parts of the aviation value chain carry different exposure to a regional conflict. A lessor owns aircraft that can be placed with airlines wherever demand exists, while a heavy-maintenance shop sells a service that requires the customer to physically deliver aircraft and technicians to a specific location. When that delivery is judged unsafe, capacity can be built and still sit unused, which is the position Joramco describes with some of its six hangars idle after the 2025 expansion.
For airlines and lessors that route heavy checks through the region, the practical question is where else comparable heavy-maintenance slots exist and at what lead time. For other MRO providers, a customer's safety judgement can move work between facilities regardless of price or turnaround.
The condition Tarapore himself sets is the conflict subsiding in its entirety; until then he expects the engineering business to keep underperforming. Further quarterly revenue figures from DAE Engineering against the $76 million base would show whether European customers have started to return.
