Revima Asia-Pacific, Revima's new MRO facility in Thailand soon to be operational
Romain Guillot
 le 13/02/2020 , Maintenance aéronautique
Things always move much more quickly in Asia. Just one year after work started, Revima Asia-Pacific, the new landing gear maintenance center for the Revima group based in Chonburi (Thailand) is getting ready to open its doors.
"The facility is finished and we are in the certification phase", Olivier Legrand, the Revima group's president, tells us. He also emphasises that the new MRO centre should be fully operational in July and that recruitment has already started. Some Thai personnel have also been trained at Revima's Caudebec-en-Caux (France) site. The new Thai maintenance centre will have a surface area of 12 000 m2 and be dedicated to landing gear for the A320 and 737NG single-aisle families. It will employ up to 300 people.
"From the outset, we configured this centre for a capacity of 600 landing gear legs per year", Olivier Legrand explains to us. He also says that the aim is to bring the company closer to operators in the Asia-Pacific region, a market which is clearly significantly on the up. Discussions have already begun with new operators based in the region.
The Revima group's president also explains to us that they hadn't considered Singapore to open their new site in Asia, or China, which already has major capacity in this area of activity. He notes that the choice of Thailand was boosted by the quality of labour available on site, but also by the Thai government's decision to develop its aviation industry, with the possibility of having full ownership of the structure on site "which isn't always the case in the region", he observes.
Revima's Chonburi facility is located near Thailand's main port. It is also practically midway between Bangkok and U-Tapao airports, making it an integral part of a major MRO sector development project which is being run by the Thai government.
Still on the subject of the Asia-Pacific region, Olivier Legrand talked about the Flightwatching predictive maintenance solution which Revima bought over last year and which is now being made available by the Hong Kong MRO company HAECO to its customers via a platform called INSIGHT.
2019 was a particularly busy year for the Revima group, with Ardian taking a majority stake in the company or its buyout of Chromalloy France, a structure which is now called Revima SOA. But the Revima group's president is already stating that 2020 will follow the same path.
After looking towards the Asia-Pacific region, the company which specialises in APU and landing gear maintenance is now setting its sights on the other side of the Atlantic as part of its development strategy. "This time it will be an external growth operation", Olivier Legrand reveals, adding that an announcement could be made in the coming months. The MRO Americas exhibition to be held in April in Dallas (Texas) is definitely one to keep an eye on...
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