(Alan O’Rourke, CC BY 2.0)
Total worldwide business and general aviation avionics sales grew 15.5% year-over-year (YOY) in the first half of 2018, according to the Aircraft Electronics Association’s second-quarter 2018 fiscal report.
The report is an aggregate of twenty-four participating companies, including Garmin, Rockwell Collins, Gogo and the appropriate divisions of Honeywell, L3 and Cobham. Participating companies submit sales to a third-party firm to produce the avionics market report in the interest of confidentiality. The year-to-date net sales of the 24 companies exceed $1.3 billion.
The largest growth (18.1%) was in the retrofit market, which makes up 57.5% of total sales, about two points higher than at the same time last year. However, both retrofit and forward-fit markets have seen double-digit YOY increases. More than three-quarters of tracked avionics sales were in North America in both first and second quarters this year, at least five points up from last year in both cases.
Last year’s total sales represented a growth of 2.9% over 2016, coming off two straight years of declining sales. If the current growth were to hold for the remainder of the year, it would be by a wide margin the strongest YOY growth since AEA started tracking the market in 2012.