Morning, everyone. I think it's still the morning. My name is Sheila Kahyaoglu with the Jefferies Aerospace, Defense and Airlines Equity Research team, for those on the webcast. We have AAR here with us. We have John Holmes, who's Chairman, President, and CEO of AAR. We'll start off with a few slides, and then we'll go into Q&A. Thanks, John.
Great. Thanks, Sheila. Great to be here with everybody, and just a few slides. Just a quick overview. I'll read this to you word by word. Not everybody here may be familiar with the AAR story, so I thought I'd just level set, and then we'll go into Q&A. AAR, been around for about 70 years, about $3.5 billion in revenue, obviously publicly traded, about $400 million in EBITDA. We report in different segments. We're not going to dwell on those segments today. We'll talk about the three main areas of business, parts, repair, and software. One important thing to note is that we have a nice balance between government and commercial. We're about 30% government, 70% commercial. AAR, even though we've been around for a long time, and I think there's still certain, I would call it, legacy impressions of what we do.
We've gone through a lot of changes in the last several years. From 2018 to today, we've done a lot of portfolio reshaping. AAR, years ago, was a much smaller, much more complex business, which is not a very good combination. We were in lots of different businesses in different markets. We weren't necessarily leaders in any of them. We were in lots of different businesses that, most importantly, were not very well connected. The team and I have been focused over the last several years on bringing a lot more focus to the portfolio. We've engaged in a number of divestitures. We've closed down facilities, we've exited product lines, we've exited businesses. We've also been making some acquisitions along the way. We've made six acquisitions in the last three years, and expect to continue to perform M&A.
Those things have been designed to bring more focus to the portfolio, build in leadership positions in different areas in aviation services, and drive more reliable growth, more consistency in our cash flow, and most importantly, margin expansion. These moves have been working. If you look at our results over the last several years, we've posted above-market growth in terms of revenue, significant EBITDA margin expansion, as well as corresponding EPS expansion. With all of those portfolio moves, the three areas that we're focused on now as a company are parts, repair, and software, offering these services to both the commercial aftermarket and the government aftermarket. We sell parts, we sell repairs, and we sell software that allows our customers, more than 100 airlines around the world, to buy and plan for the parts and repairs that we sell.
It's a unique ecosystem or platform in the market. Just to go into a tiny bit more detail in each of those three areas. First, in parts, two main activities in our parts area. One is new parts, new parts distribution. We are a factory-new distributor for OEM partners around the world. We have a unique model in this area. It's focused on two-way exclusive distributorships only, meaning if we work with an OEM, these are long-term agreements, 5- 10-year agreements, we will not represent, in a given market, competing product for that OEM, and they will not use a competing distributor. There's a lot of people out there that have had exclusive agreements, but no one in our market has leaned into it in quite the same way as we have. Almost 100% of our agreements are exclusive.
We've had 100% renewal rate on these agreements over the last 10 years. What this allows us to do is become technically proficient in an OEM's products as we represent them in the aftermarket. Most of our competitors buy inventory every quarter. They stock that inventory around the world, and they essentially act as a call center. That is not us. We are active participants out there in the market, helping our OEM partners take share. This is now the largest business inside of AAR. Of our roughly $3.5 billion in revenue, this is about $1.1 billion or $1.2 billion. It's been growing significantly. We've been putting up 20%-30% organic growth numbers over the last five years. We expect that above-market growth to continue, and this is something we are now known for in the industry.
We have an incredible pipeline of opportunities, and again, we expect that growth in new parts to distribute to continue. The other area inside of parts is used serviceable material. This is historically what AAR has been known for. We're the used parts guys. We buy aircraft and engines each year. We tear them down, we repair them, and we resell the parts. This is still an important business for us. It's shrinking. It's less than 15% of the company now as we've mixing it down. I should say shrinking as a percentage. The business itself is actually experiencing modest growth, but as a percentage of total, it's been mixing down.
It's an important business for us because it's highly transactional, keeps us in touch with the market, keeps in touch with asset values, and there is connection between what we do in USM to what we do elsewhere in the business, and I'll talk about that later. But in terms of growth, the focus for us in the parts segment is around new parts distribution. That's where we see quite a lot of runway for us. Moving on to repair, two activities in repair. One, heavy maintenance. We're the third largest in the world, largest in North America, providing heavy maintenance to airlines. When we say heavy maintenance, this is work that's being done in hangars. The aircraft comes in, we take it apart, we repair it, we put it back together. These are time-based checks.
These checks, if you own an aircraft and you are operating an aircraft, these checks have to be done every two, three, five, and 10 years. It is a captive market in a way. When I say captive market, I mean we work primarily on narrow-body aircraft. These are 737s and A320s. These aircraft cannot travel to Europe. They cannot travel to Asia. They have to be done here. We have become the largest. Our performance is exceptional. We turn aircraft faster than anybody else in our sector, and the airlines are increasingly turning to us for this service for these narrow-body aircraft. Because of that performance over the last few years, we have been expanding our margins, and we have seen meaningful EBITDA growth in this segment over the last several years, and we expect that to continue. That is heavy maintenance.
Elsewhere in repair, we perform repairs on individual aircraft components. This is component MRO. We made a big acquisition of Triumph Group's repair operation about two and a half years ago. That acquisition has gone well. It gave us a meaningful position in the component repair world. Part of our strategy now is to leverage our leadership position in heavy maintenance to drive more volume to component repair. Heavy maintenance today is a low teens EBITDA margin business. Component repair is high teens, and a couple of our facilities are low 20s EBITDA. We want to leverage our position to drive more volume to our component repair facilities, and we have the capacity to take that on. Finally, the third area of the company is software. This has got a lot of attention recently.
We made an acquisition in this space about three years ago, which is going very well. We have since made another acquisition and have launched a new product that I will talk about later. Software, the core of our software offering came to us through the acquisition three years ago of a company called Trax. Trax is a maintenance ERP system. A maintenance ERP system tracks every single element and supports every single element of an airline's maintenance organization. Trax, the company, has been around for 25 years. They support more than 110 airlines, and the combined fleet is about 6,000 aircraft. You have a very large fleet supported.
A maintenance ERP system for an airline, as I mentioned, supports every element of their maintenance operation, every part that is installed on an aircraft, every part that is on a shelf, where it was purchased, how much they paid, how long it took them to get it, every part that is out for a repair, every part that breaks. All of that is managed through Trax. If you are cutting purchase orders, if you are cutting repair orders, chances are you are cutting them through Trax. That data and the data managed by the airlines, over 100 around the world, is literally the holy grail of data for us as parts and repair providers. By combining those things, we are building what we believe is a pretty unique platform in the aftermarket. I will talk more about those connections later, but again, kind of a unique mix.
I should mention that we have some very good customers. We are doing business with the largest airlines in the world, around the world. We also have a number of great OEM relationships with our new parts distribution business and the government business. We are pretty well ensconced with a number of governments around the world as well. So a snapshot of our customer base. I wanted to keep it brief because I know we got a lot of questions, and that is the thumbnail.
Perfect. Thank you. John, thank you so much for that overview, and I am glad everybody gets to hear. Yeah, it is not bad. When it is three, it is a little bit snug, but two, we are comfortable, and I am glad more people are getting to hear about the AAR story. We just finally got more in tune in December when we launched coverage. So I think as you think about 14% organic growth in fiscal 2026 and roughly double digits, 12%, that you are looking to deliver in fiscal 2027, how do you think about that excluding your legacy business? Can you bridge us to some of the drivers, whether it is new distribution wins, recently awarded programs, and cross-selling initiatives?
Great. Thank you. I don't know if this is on.
It should be on. Yeah.
There we go. Okay. Thanks for the question. I would say the growth, and we've been proud of our above-market organic growth the last several quarters, the last couple of years, and we expect that to continue. The growth actually is coming from all three of those areas, parts, repair, and software. In the parts supply area, as you mentioned, absolutely being led by new parts distribution. We've been putting up 25%-30% organic growth numbers in new parts distribution over the last five years, and we expect above-market growth to continue. We're also seeing more and more growth out of our hangars. We have recently added 15% capacity. That capacity is coming online over the next 6- 12 months, so that'll drive growth in the hangar business, the heavy maintenance business.
As I mentioned, we've got this strategy to leverage the leadership position that we have on heavy maintenance to drive more growth in the component world, and that is working as well. So we're seeing growth there. In software, the growth percentages are very high. We don't break out software. What I would say is Trax, when we bought it, was a $25 million revenue business. We now have a clear line of sight to quadrupling that to $100 million, and we see growth beyond that from the software group. Even though it's small as a percentage of total, we do see growth coming out of software. The answer is all three of those main areas are experiencing meaningful growth, and we expect that to continue.
I guess you laid out plans for looking beyond FY 2027 of long-term growth of 8%-12%. How do you think about that algorithm? I think it's all the things you mentioned.
Yeah.
Just continued heavy maintenance growth, 15% increase in capacity, and new relationships in parts and distribution.
Yeah. No, great question. One of the questions we've been asked is the recent growth rates, for example, you just mentioned FY 2026 was 14% organic growth as compared to the medium-term targets of 8%-12%. Things are going well. The markets are cooperating with us. I would say that obviously that's a multi-year target, but if the markets stay the way they are today, those targets would look conservative.
Can you talk about your maintenance business? Maybe level set it for folks, how you think about your heavy maintenance business, how the 15% increase in hangar capacity expands that, and how do you think about a component repair element? I think you've mentioned $100 million of annual revenues are from certain customers, but only a small amount-
Right
...of component repair work.
Right. We have a significant market position on heavy maintenance. Even though we're a large player, we are a much smaller player in total on the component maintenance. But the component maintenance opportunity for us is quite large. I'll give you an example. Our largest heavy maintenance customer, we do close to $200 million a year of business with one of the largest airlines, and we are their largest heavy maintenance provider. That $200 million represents a little bit less than half of the heavy maintenance that they send out. They send out twice as much, the same customer sends out twice as much component repair work every year. So if they're sending out $500 million on the heavy maintenance side, they're sending out $1 billion a year on the component side, and we're less than 3%.
We've got a 40% share with that customer on the heavy maintenance side, and we've got a 3% share with that customer on the component side. By leveraging the position that we have with that customer, which is one of many, we believe that we can cross-sell and drive more component volume to our component facilities. We've got five component shops. Today, we're running roughly one and a quarter shifts across those shops. You can go up to three shifts across the network. We could double the throughput in our component shops. As it relates to heavy maintenance growth alone, that 15% capacity is coming online as we speak. That'll ramp throughout this year. We are exiting our highest cost facility, which is in Indianapolis.
We'll actually be out of there by the end of this calendar year, which is ahead of schedule. We are also in the middle of restructuring a heavy maintenance business that we bought called HAECO. We closed back in November. As all of those things happen, it will lead to net more capacity in the hangars, as well as better margins as we leverage our fixed cost base to support the 15% expansions, as well as exit our highest cost site in Indianapolis and move that work to other lower cost sites throughout the network. You've got growth in component, where we've got a lot of runway and a big opportunity, and you've got opportunities for growth as well as margin expansion in the heavy maintenance facilities.
I guess can you talk about some of that component repair work, those five facilities? Where are they, and how do you think about what kind of component repairs you're looking to specialize in and grow?
Sure. We've got four here in the U.S., places like Dallas, Kansas, etc, Arkansas. Then we have a very large facility over in Thailand. The types of components that we repair are predominantly engine accessories, engine components. So these are starters, generators, things like that. We also have a fair amount of mechanical components around valves, pneumatics, etc. These are on good platforms. These are CFM platforms. We have LEAP capability. We also do work on structures. So these are structures like thrust reversers, nose cowls, those larger components that go around the engines. That's an important and growing business for us.
There again, we've got capability on current gen platforms like the 737NG. We also have a joint venture with Air France where we are working on next generation platforms, particularly around wide body like A350, 787, etc. We've got solid capability on current gen platforms as well as increasing capability on the next gen.
That's great to hear. Maybe I have to ask with oil where it is today, how do you think about just demand trends that are going on? You're a fairly short cycle business. Maybe can you talk about how much visibility you have in your heavy maintenance and component repair business and what you're seeing?
Yeah. Heavy maintenance is a longer-term visibility. Our hangars are essentially sold out through the end of the decade. The customers that we have are very focused on making sure that they have capacity for that heavy maintenance because many of them don't have it themselves, and those that do, we're a much lower cost option than what they have internally. They want to make sure they've got access to our hangars. All of our major customers have signed up long-term agreements. We've got longer-term visibility into that business. The component business is shorter cycle, but as I mentioned, we want to tie that increasingly to the heavy maintenance business so that we've got longer-term visibility there too. Generally speaking, though, demand for everything we do has been very strong.
We've seen this volatility in terms of oil, etc, in the market now for several months, but we have not seen any slowdown in demand for what we've been providing. You know the airlines as well as I do. They've all discovered that they have a pricing power in many cases that they didn't necessarily know that they have, and so they've been able to pass much of the fuel bill on. Fortunately, customers are willing to pay it.
How large is your component repair business? As you think about tagging some of that along with the heavy maintenance work, how is that working out? Is it as-
Yeah
...an aircraft comes in for a heavy overhaul that you also are looking to repair some work there?
Component, in total, is about $400 million today. Again, we've got the capacity to double that if we think about shifts in our shops. The component work isn't necessarily tied to the heavy maintenance visit itself. Sometimes it is. Sometimes you will actually pull a component off the aircraft when you're doing a heavy maintenance visit and send it to one of our shops, but most of the time, those components are repaired separately. Our goal is to just tie the agreements together, meaning customer X, you want a five-year agreement for our hangars. We've got the best turnaround times in the market, and you want this price. Okay, we'll give you the deal that you want in price, and we'll give you the slots that you want for the next five years.
But in exchange for that, we want to consolidate $25 million- $50 million a year of component work that you're sending elsewhere, you're sending to lots of other providers. We can match the quality, we can match the turnaround time, we can match the price, consolidate that and send it to us, and we'll give you the heavy maintenance deal that you want. We are still at the early stages of executing that strategy. We have had a couple of wins. We can't announce all the things that we win, but we have seen proof of that concept, and we're having some encouraging conversations with other of our heavy maintenance customers. I'm confident that'll yield results.
That's great. If we could talk about new parts distribution, you mentioned it's grown 25% to 30%, I think 19% total growth in fiscal 2026. How do we think about how you're attracting customers in the portfolio, and demand trends heading into fiscal 2027?
When we think about customers in that business, we think about OEMs. We're focused on, and if you have that one recycle chart I had up here earlier, using all of the channels to market that we have to help our OEM partners, our OEM customers in the distribution business, sell more of their parts. This is working. We were not known for this a few years ago. We were known as the used parts guy that goes in the industry, as well as the investor community thought of us as used parts, but we're increasingly becoming known for new parts distribution. Because of that, we see more and more opportunities. We've also been at this two-way exclusive strategy now for coming up on 10 years. We've developed a number of case studies where we can go into a new OEM and say, hey, listen.
For example, GE Unison is a great partner of ours, a long-term partner, or Eaton, for example. We go in and we help them take share from their competitors in given markets. We have a fair amount of data now that we can use when we are pitching a new OEM to demonstrate how we have been able to do that. Since we were talking about heavy maintenance, one interesting connection there. I will stay with the Eaton example. Eaton manufactures pumps. All right? There are other manufacturers of pumps out there. Let us say it is Parker. Parker is a great OEM, but in this case, we are going to pick Eaton. Let us say that Eaton has a campaign to upgrade a pump from a Parker pump. They say, all right, on a 737, I am making up numbers here. On a 737, we have four pumps.
Today, there are Parker pumps, but we think that the Eaton pump is better. We want to pull the Eaton pump off and put the Parker pump on, and this is for a 737. If we are talking to an OEM, we can say, that is great. We, AAR, are going to work on 800 737s in our hangars this year. 800. We work on more, but of 737s, we will see 800 of them.
That is 800 opportunities for us to, at the time of overhaul, pull off the competitive product and put on yours. That is a unique channel to market that our OEMs love. Leveraging things like that is an important part of the sell. One other connection there, software. I mentioned Trax being used by 110 airlines or more than 110 airlines around the world. We have done a great job of growing Trax since we bought it.
We have gotten them into Virgin Atlantic, we have gotten them into Thai Airways, to Cathay Pacific, to Singapore Airlines, and we got them into Delta last year, and we are in the middle of that implementation now. Again, when we are talking to an OEM about how we can help them take market share, the software element becomes important as well because you say, listen, our software is being used by tens of thousands of buyers and planners at more than 100 airlines around the world to cut the purchase orders for the products that you sell. We are literally on the desktop when that decision is made. We can be on the floor in the hangar to help actually do the install, but we are on the desktop when that purchase decision is made inside the airline buying your product, OEM.
That again is a unique connection that we can sell as we are looking for new distributorships.
Can we talk about the recent Woodward agreement you signed? You're expanding your relationship into LEAP-related applications. How do you think about the significance of that partnership and your go-forward position-
Yeah
...on the broader engine aftermarket?
We're extremely excited about the second agreement that we've now signed with Woodward on the distribution side. The first deal that we did with Woodward was on the government side, and it's important to note that our distribution business, like all of AAR, covers both commercial and government. We've found that OEMs often like to start with government because it's a particular pain point for them, and it's a good way for us to get in. So a little over a year ago, we signed our first agreement with Woodward on the government side. That's gone very well, and they've said, okay, great. That's going well on the government side. We'll start you out with a small group of products on the commercial side. And we're off to a good start.
As you mentioned, it's LEAP, so we like the market, we like the product, and we expect that there's much more commercial business behind that with Woodward when we're successful. There's a great chart if you go to our May investor deck, there's a great chart that looks at our distribution business over the last 10 years. And it shows the growth, which has been substantial, but there's OEM logos that appear over and over again, and that either means we've renewed or expanded an agreement with an OEM. For example, the Unison deal that I talked about when we signed that deal about 12 years ago, it was about a $10 million a year deal. Today, it's over $100 million, and we see the same opportunity with companies like Woodward and others.
A recurring theme, I think, has been parts availability. Customers, just understanding customer patterns to help them keep their market share or gain market share, as you mentioned with the Eaton example. How do you demonstrate that to the airlines that using your solutions, whether it's component repair or it's distribution, helps you position the OEM better or the airline better?
Sure. One of the things that we increasingly look to get from the software business, as well as all of our other maintenance activities, is data on parts consumption, data on demand trends. That helps us become much, much smarter in terms of how we forecast demand. We can provide our OEM partners insights into their aftermarket demand that they do not get themselves. That, of course, informs our ordering patterns, which informs what we have on the shelf, which allows us to achieve a higher fill rate with the customers, the end customers, the airlines, and buffer some of the supply chain challenges that the OEMs have.
Trax, as you mentioned, has quadrupled and is about $100 million of revenue today.
Run rating, yeah.
Run rating, sorry. How do you think about just airlines that have adopted it, how you look at broader adoption, and how should investors think about the revenue and margin opportunity?
Sure. Going back to the reason we acquired Trax, one, as I mentioned, was to open doors for Trax to get them into new customers, and I mentioned several of them that where we've been successful in getting Trax into a new customer. There are many more that are on legacy systems. If you look at the world's fleet, about 50% of the world's fleet is still supported by legacy systems. These are 30, 40-year-old systems, like the one we're replacing at Delta, that have been around obviously for decades. Those systems need to be upgraded. 50% of the world's fleet is still an upgrade opportunity to a next-gen system like Trax. Trax really has two competitors today. We've been successful, significantly successful in all of the recent competitions.
Trax is being-- They've got the best product, and what they needed was a big backer like AAR to get them into the best airlines, and that's exactly what we're doing. We've still got 50% of the world's fleet that is an opportunity to deploy Trax. Beyond that, though, the Trax existing customer base, many of them, still about 50% of those customers are on Legacy Trax. Legacy Trax is on-prem, so it's not in the cloud, and it's much cheaper than the current generation of Trax, which is called eMRO. eMRO is a much more robust offering, much more capability. It is fully SaaS-based and in the cloud, and the revenue per customer on eMRO is much higher than Legacy Trax.
As we penetrate the market and win new customers like Delta, as we upgrade Legacy Trax customers to new eMRO, both of those provide revenue growth. I have said this before, we were here a year and a half ago, and I said we wanted to go from 25% to 50%, now from 50% to 100%, and I think there are opportunities to potentially double the software business again.
You launched Airvoyant, I think, at MRO Americas.
Yeah.
Back in April of this year. Is it still in beta testing? What has been customer acceptance there?
Still in beta testing. Still a tremendous amount of interest. Airvoyant, just so everybody knows, is an AI-driven procurement model. Airlines have spent a lot of money in terms of inventory planning and how to plan inventory to make sure they have the right amount of inventory on their shelf. But there has not been a good solution for airlines to actually physically buy parts. It is insane how manual it is. Some of you have heard me say this before, but we know this because we own Trax, and we know this because we sell a lot of parts, and we are on the other side of it. They are emailing out spreadsheets with hundreds, thousands of line items to brokers like us, vendors like us to quote parts back to them. We manually respond, and they manually review the pricing.
It's horrifically inefficient, and it leads to poor decision-making because oftentimes the airlines are making the buy decision based on who got back to them first, who filled out the most lines in the spreadsheet, who do they like the best. It's not a way to buy parts. Airlines are spending $60 billion a year on parts. This is a huge market. We want to bring AI to that and help bring efficiency to the airlines, and drive better decision-making. We launched this product called Airvoyant in April. It's a beta version. The enthusiasm by the airlines is significant. Not one airline, and we've presented it to dozens so far, has argued that this is a problem. They're all like, yes, this is a problem. We need to fix it.
But can it also do this, and can it also do this, and can it also do this? We're working with a number of airlines right now on continuing to refine the product. We've invested a lot of money in it. We're not receiving revenue from it to date. Our goal is to just get it out there. Once we do, we see it as a potential revenue source. We see it as a potential way to drive data that'll inform what we put on the shelf as well as what customers buy.
Maybe one thing that's transitioning to margins and execution for a bit, it surprised me since I've launched coverage, is the level of margin expansion we've seen. How do you think about the right range for the margin profile and the long-term growth rate? For margins
Well, we put out 14%+ , 13%-14%+ ex legacy commercial programs at the Investor Day in terms of, I think it was a three-year target for EBITDA. In the fourth quarter that we announced we were at 13%, so we've already achieved the low end of that range. Again, as I mentioned, if conditions remain the way we are today, we think we can do better, which is why we put the plus. We're focused on mid-teens EBITDA over time. Then growth at the same conference, we put out 8%-12% growth, and again, to the extent that conditions remain the way we are, I think we can do better.
That's great. Can you update us on the HAECO acquisition? Where are you today in terms of margins, and how do you think about the revenue profile of that business?
Yeah. Just to remind everybody, HAECO was our largest heavy maintenance competitor that we acquired late last year. It is a restructuring process. They were a very low-margin provider of heavy maintenance, and we are bringing revenue down and deploying our systems. We've signed up multiple customer agreements for those facilities, and we expect to bring revenue or margins up to the level of all of our other facilities by the end of this fiscal year. We are actually, in a lot of ways, ahead of schedule on that acquisition. So you saw two quarters of, I would say, margin dilution. Q3 was the low point. Q4 was better, and we expect to continue to climb out of that and be at run rate by the end of this fiscal year.
Great. Can you talk about maybe some of the transformation and productivity efforts you have within the business internally? Indianapolis, you're exiting.
You're also looking at paperless to improve productivity. How do we think about that benefit, if you could size it in fiscal 2027 as we think about the 13% in the last quarter?
Sure. I don't know that I can break it out specifically, but you've seen the most margin expansion in any of our businesses inside of heavy maintenance, and that's as a result of becoming very focused on the platforms that we work on, dedicating facilities to customers so that you turn yourself into a production environment. You're not working on lots of different types of aircraft. You're focused on single assets with single customers. But then, as you point out, systems, and I would say the most beneficial system that we have is paperless. There is an enormous amount of paperwork that goes with maintaining aircraft, and we are in the business of selling labor hours. We're in the business of selling time, and so our focus with all of these systems is to reduce the time it takes to complete a task.
That all translates to lower turnaround time for the customers. Just to size that for you, a C check, which is like a medium maintenance visit that might be done after three or five years, an average check might take 30- 35 days. That's kind of the industry standard. We're in the high 20s, which is faster than anybody else, and customers will pay us a premium for that performance because if they get that aircraft back one week sooner, that's one additional week they can have that aircraft in revenue service, which is worth a lot to them. So the systems, etc, that we've put in allow us to get greater throughput for the hangars, but it also, in some cases, allows us to charge a premium because we've got that faster turnaround time. Both of those things contribute to margins.
Your leverage is at 2.5x . You've actually been quite acquisitive. How do you think about deploying capital from acquisitions to internal investment and just balancing shareholder returns as well?
Sure. I think at the end of Q4, we're actually a little bit lower on that.
That's right.
We were right at 2x . We've made great progress in the last couple of minutes. I think our target is to be within 2x- 2.5x . Would we stretch above that for the right acquisition? Absolutely. We have in the past. We continue to think about organic investment first, inorganic investment second, as we look to grow. Everybody should expect that M&A will continue to be part of the growth story at AAR. We've done six acquisitions in the last three years. They're all working very well.
We've got a healthy pipeline. We've got that muscle moving inside the company, and we expect to continue to deploy capital for inorganic growth opportunities. They have to fit. I say that because historically, we were less disciplined in M&A and made acquisitions that were kind of left turns here and there. Anything we do will absolutely sit in that parts, repair, and software. It has to be in one of those three areas, and it has to be connected to one of the businesses that we're in. Full pipeline, balance sheet is in a great spot, and we have much more confidence than we did historically in terms of the cash flow generation of the company.
Maybe last one to close with, 15 seconds left. In three to five years, how do you envision AAR? What do you envision AAR becoming?
We want to become the largest and leading independent provider of these aftermarket services, and we've got the platform to do that.
That's great.
All right.
Well, thank you so much, John.
Thank you.