Currier says the firm responded “too late” to supplier problems, promises an overhaul that will benefit the company for decades.
The chief executive of Honeywell Aerospace has elaborated on supply chain issues that last month prompted the newly independent company to walk back 2026 financial projections.
CEO Jim Currier said on 9 September that the aerospace manufacturer started late in addressing the problems, while noting that bearings and machined, cast and forged metallic components are those most holding up production.
“We were a little late in pivoting the organisation, as part of the conglomerate, to be able to capture that demand we were seeing coming out of the pandemic,” Currier says, speaking during an investor conference hosted by financial firm Jefferies.
He adds that supplier struggles have not eroded Honeywell Aerospace’s “ability to execute” and that the firm is not losing orders as a result. “We are not seeing erosion in terms of our products or portfolios or the order book,” he says.
Former parent Honeywell spun Honeywell Aerospace into a standalone company on 29 June, following a divestiture playbook several other conglomerates recently spearheaded.
Currier and his team approached the spin insisting independence would leave Honeywell Aerospace more effective and efficient and better positioned to invest and address market demand.
Just ahead of the spin, executives predicted the firm would turn a $4.65-4.75 billion adjusted 2026 profit, with sales up 7-9% year on year.
Then on 6 August, about one month after the spin, Honeywell Aerospace walked back those projections, saying a $4.35-4.45 billion adjusted 2026 profit and 4-5% sales growth is more realistic, saying the company underestimated the scope of supply chain problems.
Legacy of outsourcing
Currier has now elaborated on the problems and their genesis. From 2010 to 2019, then under its former parent, Honeywell Aerospace had moved away from vertical integration, including by replacing multiple with single suppliers of many parts.
“We really maximised the supply base to be running… a highly efficient operation”, Currier says, noting demand at the time was “not very strong”.
“We were outsourcing a lot of the core competencies,” Currier adds. “We were very, very singled sourced in many regards.”
Then came the Covid-19 pandemic and the post-pandemic boom. Demand for aircraft and aerospace components has recently been red hot, but some key Honeywell Aerospace’s suppliers have been slow to ramp up.
After becoming CEO in 2023, Currier says, he “pivoted” the firm to address those issues, including with a $1 billion supply base investment.
Still, Currier says 70 of 3,000 suppliers are still struggling to meet requirements, with 10 classified as “constrained”, meaning they are “not delivering to our plan, not growing year on year to the levels that are necessary, and hence [have] become the bottleneck”.
Those 10 suppliers provide four categories of components: bearings, machined parts, cast parts and forged parts. Of those, bearing suppliers are most troubled, with production “well below plan”, according to Honeywell Aerospace.
Poor planning, skilled labour and raw material shortages, lack of vertical integration, old tooling and insufficient investment are factors to blame, Currier says.
He insists his team is fixing the problems and that progress is being made, thanks partly to the company bringing on additional suppliers.
“We are incurring many costs by going multi-source across the board… in those highly constrained areas,” Currier says, while promising efficiency and productivity gains. “We really truly understand what are the critical root causes of the issues that these individual companies are experiencing.”
He also insists the result will be more than a mended supply chain.
“This is not a fix. Three years from now, you are going to see an industrial supply base within Honeywell Aerospace that is going to be able to double our business in the next ten years,” Currier says. “This is going to be an enduring and lasting change.”
The post Honeywell Aerospace CEO details supply chain snarls, reasons for revised 2026 forecast first appeared on FlightGlobal.