Piper Aircraft, Inc. is taking its first steps locally to delivering on its recently announced plans to increase its presence in the Asia Pacific market.
After being acquired by corporate finance and investment management firm Imprimis (based in Singapore and Brunei Darussalam) in 2009, a revitalised Piper used this year’s Singapore Airshow in February as the platform to announce plans to expand its business in the Asia Pacific through a range of initiatives.
Hoping to ride the wave of growth forecast for the region, Piper formed new company Piper Aircraft Asia, Snd Bhd to further focus its efforts in the region, including Australia.
“We are making major commitments to expanding our business and providing top quality aircraft and service throughout Asia/Pacific,” Piper Aircraft Asia’s Managing Director Mary Messuti said. “We have made huge inroads in establishing ourselves in the Asia Pacific market, and our expectation is to continue significant growth in the region.”
With the first of the new PiperSport LSAs already delivered to customers overseas and hopefully headed to our shores in the near future, and with the PiperJet program receiving a financial boost through the Imprimis acquisition of the company, Piper has exciting new wares to push to the market.
But locally it’s their mainstay models, complete with advanced avionics, that are still leading the way. Piper recently delivered 16 new Piper Warriors and four new twin engine Piper Seminoles, all equipped with glass flight decks, to Wagga Wagga-based Australian Airline Pilot Academy (AAPA), a wholly owned subsidiary of Regional Express.
“Piper’s presence in Australia continues to be significant,” Messuti said. “The market in Australia – and throughout the rest of Asia for that matter – is expected to experience steady growth for two to six-seat aircraft over the next five years in part due to shifting demographics and increasing demand for pilot training from training schools and flying clubs.”
While headquartered in Brunei Darussalam, Piper Aircraft Asia has announced plans to set up major sales and service operations throughout the Asia Pacific region, which could possibly see a local office opened in Australia. And Piper is also currently evaluating potential candidates who could act as a local Piper dealer, which could lead to new demo aircraft being permanently based here.
“As we progress with establishing sales agents and dealer(s) in Australia, so will we progress with establishing a demo fleet,” Messuti explained. “Given the size of the market in Australia and the potential demand for Piper’s latest aircraft models – especially the PA-46 family of aircraft – we anticipate that we will have one or two demo aircraft based in Australia at some point in the future.”
As well as establishing Piper Aircraft Asia, Piper also recently appointed Aviall Services, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Boeing, as its global parts distributor, providing supply chain support for the company’s global dealer network and individual customers.
As Piper Aircraft Asia’s newly appointed Vice President of Marketing, Australia, well-known local GA identity Allan Bligh is heading up the manufacturer’s efforts in Australia and hopes to both encourage new aircraft purchases and provide better support for the more than 1800 Pipers already in the country.
“I’m now developing and assisting in developing the market,” Bligh says. “We’re talking to service centres, we’ve put in Aviall to distribute parts worldwide, and we’re getting on with the job of putting Piper back where it should be on the sales pedestal.
“1800 aircraft just by themselves deserve proper support; there’s someone here now that can do something and firmly grasp the product, and there’s now a stable parts system which is common across the world.
“Everytime [Piper] deliver an aeroplane in Australia they enhance the value of the aircraft that are here, and we acknowledge that the past customers enhance our prospect of selling them. So I think it’s a reasonable thing to care for the past and look to the future.”