As Recaro Aircraft Seating arrives at AIX, its financial performance reflects the almost contradictory challenges facing leading interiors suppliers three years after the pandemic ended. On the one hand, the German manufacturer’s latest results show a record orderbook worth more than €2 billion ($2.19 billion). Sales in 2024 saw double-digit growth.
However, those €588 million revenues at the family-owned firm remain about a fifth lower than in 2019. And while Recaro is employing 10% more staff than before Covid-19, with a worldwide workforce of just over 3,000, much of this growth is because it needs more employees to manage a rapid increase in production amid a still fragile supplier base.
“We are happy with our performance, but it requires a lot of effort,” admits chief executive Mark Hiller, speaking to FlightGlobal just ahead of the Hamburg event. “There are higher costs in the supply chain, and it requires more monitoring. We are putting a lot of effort into fulfilling our orderbook by ramping up at all our sites.”
Among the products Recaro will be producing a lot more of in 2025 is the R3 long-haul economy class seat – which has about 40 programmes – as more examples of the Airbus A321LR and A321XLR enter service. Customers include launch operator Iberia, which is installing the product on eight A321XLRs flying transatlantic routes from Madrid. Production numbers, says Hiller, are “growing tremendously”.
Other significant recent wins include Latam Airlines, which is retrofitting its Boeing 787s with Recaro’s R7 mini-suite, one of several business class products Recaro now offers, and Indian carrier IndiGo, which is equipping its A321s with R5 business class seats as well as the R2 economy class product.
At last year’s show, Recaro announced it was rebranding its seat range around R designations, replacing BL, CL, PL and SL families, with their four-digit designations, with a simpler naming convention. The numbers broadly rise as the seat becomes more complex, so the R1 is Recaro’s basic short-haul economy product, while R7 is its roughly 80kg top of the range offering.
Although Recaro made its name in economy seating, increasing its penetration in the premium market – a segment in which it competes with the likes of Stelia and Thompson as well as traditional rivals Collins and Safran – is one of Hiller’s longer-term ambitions. In fact, he has stated that he wants Recaro to be “the market leader” in business class.
The renaming of its product line up perhaps indicates where Recaro’s next launches will be. For instance, while there is an R5 and an R7, there is currently no R6. “The R6 will happen. I am waiting for a proposal from my design team,” says Hiller, who adds: “The R7 will not be enough [at the top end of business class]. Maybe we will need an R8.”
Despite the competition in this segment, Hiller insists there is still plenty of opportunity “for an innovative business class supplier with a good performance record”. Success in this area of the market, he says, depends on “quality, weight, and delivery”.
Recaro, based in the town of Schwabisch Hall near Stuttgart, has also been targeting new markets, including large regional jets. After success with Embraer’s E2 range, the company last year secured Air Baltic as a customer for the R2 seat on its Airbus A220-300s. The Latvian carrier, the largest operator of the type, will equip its jets with 148 seats.
Recaro is also seeking further deals in the urban air mobility market after last year announcing a deal with Embraer offshoot Eve last year to design, certificate, and produce 75,000 seats – in shipsets of five – for its electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) air taxi, which is intended to enter service in 2027.
Although he admits that developers have faced funding challenges and most programmes have been delayed well beyond original certification timelines, Hiller says he is “as excited as we have ever been about the eVTOL market”. He adds: “It fits very well with our DNA because it is all about providing good comfort with stringent safety requirements. I am expecting a huge market in the next couple of years.”
To meet the expected hike in demand for its products, Recaro has been stepping up its investment in its overseas facilities, in China, Poland, and the USA. He says the objective is to move almost all production of economy products to the foreign sites, which have “set ups more suitable to high volume”, with Schwabisch Hall focusing on design engineering and premium lines.
Flexibility, maintains Hiller, has been “key” to Recaro’s philosophy since before the pandemic. “Our objective is always to be aligned with the customer and the OEM and to constantly be looking for new ways to balance workflow and production” he says.
