Air Lease Corporation (NYSE:AL) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Greg Willis: And then second question was with regards to lease rates catching up with interest rates and quarter-to-quarter there’s been all kinds of publications out there about what the market is seeing in terms of lease rate increases, some forums have been repeating — reporting that lease rates have gone up north of 20%, and we’re continuing to see our lease rates go up. So as we continue to deliver our order book, there should be upward pressure on our lease margins. Again, that’s being balanced with the aircraft that are being sold.

Vincent Caintic: Okay, great. Very helpful. Thanks very much.

Greg Willis: Thank you.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Stephen Trent from Citi. Your line is open.

Stephen Trent: Hi. Yes, good morning gentlemen. And thanks very much for taking my questions. I was curious, in terms of your product suite, if you’d — to what extent you would consider leaning more heavily or exploring, doing more engine leasing versus the bread-and-butter aircraft leasing?

Greg Willis: I think right now our core business is to focus on commercial passenger traffic leasing. I don’t see us going too far into the engine leasing space or helicopters or other forms of transportation leasing. I think our expertise is in passenger jet aircraft.

Steve Hazy: And the reality today is spare engines are really scarce to come by. And so, building a platform in the middle of some turmoil in the aircraft engine world globally is not something that’s on the table right now.

Stephen Trent: Really appreciate it. And I’m guessing appropriately that answer, that an acquisition on that side of the fence is also something you’re not really contemplating at the moment?

Steve Hazy: Well, the other thing is, if we bought 100 engines today, the financial impact on Air Lease will be minimal. That would be like two widebody aircrafts. So going heavily into engine acquisitions would not meaningfully move the needle in terms of revenues, ROEs, margins. And as Greg said, we would have to add staffs and experts in that segment of the business. So we’ve looked at this — we do have some selected engines that we are going to be leasing to airlines. But it’s not a real strong focal point of our business. There’s others that have the expertise and the infrastructure and facilities to deal with engine leasing.

Stephen Trent: Okay, very clear. Appreciate the time. And thank you.

John Plueger: Thank you.

Operator: And we have reached the end of our question-and-answer session. Mr. Arnold, I turn the call back over to you.

Jason Arnold: Thanks very much, Rob, and thank you all for participating in our third quarter earnings call. We look forward to speaking with you again when we report the fourth quarter results. Operator, please disconnect the line.

Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. You may now disconnect.

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