AerCap Holdings N.V. Q3 2025 earnings call

Thank you, Operator, and hello everyone. Welcome to our third quarter 2025 conference call. With me today is our Chief Executive Officer Aengus Kelly and our Chief Financial Officer Pete Juhas. Before we begin today's call, I would like to remind you that some statements made during this conference call, which are not historical facts, may be forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results or events to differ materially from those expressed or implied in such statements. AerCap undertakes no obligation other than that imposed by law to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements to reflect future events, information, or circumstances such as that arise after this call. Further information concerning issues that could materially affect performance can be found in AerCap's earnings release dated October 29th, 2025.

A copy of the earnings release and conference call presentation are available on our website at aercap.com. This call is open to the public and is being webcast simultaneously at aercap.com and will be archived for replay. We will shortly run through our earnings presentation and will allow time at the end for Q&A. As a reminder, I would ask that analysts limit themselves to one question and one follow-up. I will now turn the call over to Aengus Kelly.

Thank you for joining us for our third quarter 2025 earnings call. We are pleased to report another exceptional quarter for AerCap shareholders. In Q3 we generated GAAP net income of $1.2 billion and earnings per share of $6.98, driven by strong gains on sale and further insurance recoveries. Our core business continues to perform extremely well with adjusted net income of $865 million and a record adjusted EPS of $4.97. Given these solid results and our positive outlook for the remainder of the year, we have increased our 2025 full year EPS guidance to $13.70. On the aircraft side, we continue to see strong demand from our customers around the world and the environment remains supportive for both margins and returns. Once again, utilization rates topped 99%.

I am delighted that we delivered our first converted Boeing 777-300ER freighter in September, which should help to sustain the historically high utilization rates we are seeing as those aircraft deliver to customers. We also had yet another healthy extension rate in the quarter, with approximately 85% of our 33 used aircraft transactions extending on very attractive terms. Encouragingly, the extension rate for widebodies was 100%, including nine 787s, three 777-300ERs, and two A330s in the period. One thing that seems to be overlooked in the focus on MAX production rates and narrowbody engine issues is how far the OEMs are behind in the widebody production side as well. As an example, both OEMs produced more widebody aircraft in 2008 than they did last year, and I do not expect them to surpass the peak of 2016 this decade.

As a result, widebody aircraft will remain in high demand for the foreseeable future. The picture is similarly robust on the narrowbody side with strong demand across the board. This is particularly helpful at the moment, given we're taking back 27 aircraft from Spirit Airlines. We will of course have downtime and engine shop visit costs associated with this process. The majority of the engine shop visit costs will be incurred in the fourth quarter. These engine costs are included in our increased guidance for the year. We will also benefit from the acquisition of Spirit's 52 Airbus A320neo family order book as well as a further 45 options that we negotiated with Airbus. We believe that the timing and pricing of these units is far superior to what we could have negotiated with Airbus directly.

In fact, the order and options mean we have now agreed to purchase over 200 aircraft in bilateral deals since 2021 without placing a direct OEM order. Turning to the engine business, we continue to focus on deepening our relationships with our OEM, airline, and MRO partners. This was evidenced most recently with our latest announcement with GE Aerospace, where we signed a seven-year agreement to provide lease pool management services for the GE9X. This agreement also extended AerCap's ongoing lease pool support for GEnx, GE90, CF6, and CF34 engines and follows on from our separate partnership with Air France KLM, which we announced at the Paris Airshow. The provision of spare engine support has become a key part of AerCap's overall customer proposition, particularly at the moment given the global engine shortages.

Our portfolio of 1,200 spare engines, 90% of which are the latest technology, is another key differentiator between AerCap and any of our competitors. Since closing the GECAS transaction, we have committed approximately $10 billion to engines through our two engine divisions, AerCap Engines and SES.

Turning to Milestone Aviation Group, our helicopter leasing business, fleet utilization also remains high. During the quarter, we extended a large percentage of helicopter leases with existing customers across a broad array of mission profiles and operators. From a fleet perspective, we adopt a balanced portfolio management strategy in our helicopter business, similar to our barbell approach. On the commercial aircraft side, we continue to invest in new technology medium and super medium helicopters at accretive returns while divesting out of midlife or out-of-production types. During the quarter, we delivered new technology equipment to customers operating across a full spectrum of mission-critical segments, including offshore oil and gas, emergency medical services, and search and rescue, including an AW139 to Bristow configured for use in the U.K. search and rescue operations.

Now, on capital allocation, we continue to see the durable demand for our assets reflected in very strong sales volumes and margins. As you will recall, last quarter we increased our sales volume guidance for the year by 25% to $2.5 billion. Despite the lower number of sales closing, we had good line of sight to what was ahead of us, and it has been great to see this materialize. In fact, both the sales volumes of $1.5 billion and the gain of $332 million were records in themselves. The timing of closing each deal is always variable, but there is no doubt we are seeing a positive environment overall. Further, while we will not be selling $1.5 billion every quarter, you can see that gain on sale has been an important, repeatable, and profitable aspect of our earnings over a very long period of time.

We have generated gains on sale in every quarter for the last 40+ quarters, or more than 10 years in a row. Our average unlevered margin is over 15% or more than 1.5x book equity value over the course of the last 40+ quarters. This is despite various challenges the industry has faced and includes all of the quarters during COVID. Those returns have been further enhanced by highly disciplined capital deployment into accretive opportunities in material asset acquisitions and share repurchases. Recently, we have been asked whether the long-established arbitrage between where our assets price in the private markets and the level those assets trade in the public markets still exists given the improvement in valuation of the stock above 1x book equity value.

The truth, as you will see from the chart on the left hand side, is that it is not the absolute level of either sales or repurchases that matters more, but the delta between the two. While AerCap's shares are trading at a higher price to book multiple, the increases in sales margins have actually been greater. This is why we continue to find share repurchases to be extremely attractive. As you can see from the chart on the right hand side, in the third quarter alone we bought 5% of the market cap for $1 billion, a quarterly record for open market purchases for AerCap. We simply cannot demonstrate our conviction any clearer than that. In summary, this was another great quarter for AerCap.

With earnings and cash flows remaining strong throughout the business and the addition of up to 97 A320 family aircraft to our order book, the favorable market environment continues and this is reflected in the results across the group as a whole. We continue to deploy capital effectively with the purchase of approximately $1 billion of stock and $1.4 billion of new equipment in the quarter. This shows the remarkable cash generation and optionality we have for capital deployment at AerCap, a theme we expect to continue for the long term.

With that, I'll now hand the call over to Pete to review the financials and the outlook for the remainder of 2025. Thank you.

Thanks, Gus. Good morning, everyone. Our GAAP net income for the third quarter was $1.216 billion or $6.98 per share. The impact of purchase accounting adjustments was $62 million for the quarter, or $0.36 a share. We had net recoveries related to the Ukraine conflict of $475 million or $2.73 a share. That includes cash insurance settlements of $238 million as well as an award of $234 million of interest on the favorable decision by the London Commercial Court in June, along with some other smaller settlements. That brings our total recoveries to approximately $2.9 billion since 2023. The net tax effect of the purchase accounting adjustments and the Ukraine recoveries taken together was $62 million or $0.36 a share. As a result, our adjusted net income for the third quarter was $865 million or $4.97 per share. We had a record quarter in terms of both the volume of assets sold as well as gains on sale.

We sold 32 of our owned assets for total sales revenue of $1.5 billion. That resulted in gain on sale of $332 million and an unlevered gain on sale margin of 28%, which is twice our book value. The large sales volume was driven by the continued strong sales environment as well as closing sales that had been signed up earlier in the year. As of September 30th, we had $562 million worth of assets held for sale, and at this point I'd expect our sales for the full year to be over $3 billion. Besides the gains on sale and Ukraine conflict recoveries, there were 2 other main items that affected our results for the third quarter. First, we had a strong net maintenance contribution, that is maintenance revenue, less leasing expenses on an adjusted basis of $148 million.

That was driven by the release of maintenance reserves upon lease terminations, settlements we received from airlines and a provision release as the Azul restructuring agreement became effective. We're expecting higher leasing expenses in the fourth quarter related to the Spirit Airlines restructuring, and that's reflected in our updated guidance. The other major driver this quarter was a significant increase in lease rents, which in turn resulted in a higher lease yield and a net spread of 8%, which is the highest we've had in five years. The increase this quarter was driven in part by some large transactions involving a number of older aircraft. We've also started to deliver our 777-300ERs, which were converted from passenger aircraft to freighters and are now earning revenue. Turning to liquidity, our liquidity position continues to be very strong. As of September 30, our total sources of liquidity were approximately $22 billion.

That includes $1.8 billion of cash and over $12 billion of revolvers and other committed facilities. Our sources to uses coverage ratio at the end of the quarter was 2.1x, which amounts to excess cash coverage of around $12 billion. Given our higher net income this quarter, including the net recoveries related to the Ukraine conflict, we generated significant excess capital, resulting in a leverage ratio of 2.1 to 1. At the end of September, our operating cash flow was slightly higher than normal this quarter at approximately $1.5 billion. We deployed a significant amount of excess capital this quarter and returned $981 million to shareholders through the repurchase of 8.2 million shares at a price of just under $120 including the share repurchases we've completed.

Far in the fourth quarter, that takes us to over $2 billion of buybacks so far this year. Turning now to guidance on our last earnings call. Given strong performance for the first half of the year, we raised our full year 2025 EPS guidance to approximately $11.60. As Gus mentioned today, we are again raising our full year 2025 adjusted EPS guidance to $13.70. That includes approximately $2.70 of gains on sale for the first three quarters, but it does not include any gains on sale for the fourth quarter. As I mentioned last quarter, our outperformance relative to guidance has been driven primarily by higher lease revenue, other income, and gains on sale. We've also incorporated the expected impact of the Spirit Airlines Chapter 11 bankruptcy into this updated guidance. In closing, we're coming off another record quarter for AerCap.

As you can see, the environment for aircraft leasing and aircraft sales continues to be strong. We've continued to make progress in our Ukraine recoveries, and we continue to be in a position of strength with a strong balance sheet, low leverage, strong liquidity, and disciplined capital deployment. We remain confident about the outlook for the business, as you can see from the increase in our full year guidance and our repurchases of over $2 billion of stock so far this year. With that, operator, we'll open up the call for Q&A.