Figeac Aero

Figeac Aero is what the aerospace supply chain calls a tier one machinist, and it grew out of a single workshop in the Lot. Jean-Claude Maillard set it up in January 1989 with 18,000 euros of capital. It now employs around 3,300 people, listed on Euronext Paris in 2013 under the ticker FGA, and reported revenue of 432.3 million euros in its 2024/25 financial year with a further set of full-year results published in June 2026. Structural components account for the large majority of sales, close to ninety percent. Net income for that year was a slim 3.6 million euros, which is the shape of the business: high revenue, heavy machine investment, thin margins, and results that swing hard with airframer build rates.

The work divides into a handful of related activities. Structural parts are the core, large machined components in aluminium alloys and in hard metals such as titanium and stainless steel, the frames, spars, ribs and fittings that make up an airframe. Engine and precision parts form a second line, covering smaller high-tolerance components for propulsion systems including work for CFM. Sub-assemblies are where the company adds value beyond machining, joining its own parts with bought-in items and delivering a finished module rather than a box of pieces, and landing gear components sit in the same category. Around those sit the supporting processes the company sells as capabilities in their own right: metal processing, surface treatment, assembly, inspection and quality control, and supply chain management. Engineering and industrialisation services take a customer's design and turn it into a producible, tooled and fully qualified manufacturing route, and a Speedshop operation handles the urgent short-run and spare part demand that a normal production line cannot absorb.

The customer list reads like a census of Western aerospace. Airbus takes parts for the A320, A350 and A380, Boeing for the 787, and the company also supplies Dassault, Embraer, Bombardier, Gulfstream, Safran, Spirit AeroSystems and Stelia Aerospace. Defence exposure comes through those customer relationships rather than through any separate military division, chiefly via Dassault combat aircraft work and engine components that feed both civil and military programmes. Manufacturing is deliberately spread for cost and currency reasons. Alongside the French plants the group operates in Tunisia, Morocco and Mexico, and holds a United States footprint at Wichita, Kansas, which puts it inside the supply radius of the American airframers. That geographic spread, built out during the last decade of single-aisle ramp-up, is also what exposed the company to the sharp cyclical swings that come with being paid per shipset rather than per programme. The Wichita plant matters disproportionately, because being physically present in Kansas is what makes the company credible to American buyers.