GE Aerospace Powers Earnings Season With Enviable Results

GE Aerospace is cementing its rank atop the list of publicly traded Western aerospace and defense companies, with its latest third-quarter 2025 results providing another “beat-and-raise” validation that sets up the engine and propulsion OEM to be a dominant investor choice in the foreseeable future.

“Everybody’s head’s down trying to be productive every day, take care of the customer, day in, day out, week in, week out,” GE Aerospace Chairman and CEO Larry Culp Jr. told Aviation Week Oct. 21. “And every so often you need to lift your head up and say, you know, how are we doing? It’s good to see all the underlying operational improvements that we think we are delivering, in turn translating into the results that we posted this morning.”

GE Aerospace reported total revenue of $12.2 billion for the third quarter ended Sept. 30, up 24% from a year before. Profit was $2.5 billion, up 33%, with operating profit of $2.3 billion, up 26%. Continuing earnings per share (EPS) were $2.04, up 31%. Free cash flow (FCF) was $2.4 billion, up 30%.

Those results towered over Wall Street’s already lofty expectations. Better yet, GE Aerospace raised its forecasts. Core sales growth guidance for all of 2025 was tweaked up to high-teens percentage from mid-teens—slightly above the Street’s expectations of 16% growth and driven primarily by higher growth expectations in commercial aftermarket and defense end markets, according to Melius Research.

GE also raised its operating profit target by 5% at the midpoint to $8.75B, a percentage point above Street expectations. The EPS and FCF guidance midpoints were both raised by 7%, resulting in midpoints that were 3% and 4% ahead of consensus, respectively, analyst Scott Mikus of Melius told his clients.

“Going forward, the long-term outlook for GE continues to look excellent,” he said.

“More than enough to keep the name grinding higher still,” analysts at Jefferies concurred.

GE Aerospace’s stock price closed at a new high of $306.63, up 1.3% in regular trading after the financial results were released.

The company is flying high on a combination of improving deliveries to OEMs, robust aftermarket work, improving supply chain and increasing defense work. Commercial aftermarket sales were up 28% in the latest quarter. And through the third quarter, GE Aerospace has cut the number of days it takes to disassemble a Leap engine by 33%, while shop visit turnaround times for its other engines continue to improve as its maintenance network shares best practices and develops component repairs to alleviate supply chain bottlenecks. Leap deliveries were 511 in the third quarter, compared with 410 in the second quarter.

Culp stresses that priority suppliers have improved their deliveries to GE Aerospace by “high-single-digits,” percentage-wise, since the second quarter, he told Aviation Week. The compounding effect year-over-year of that sequential improvement is how you get that 35% improvement year-over-year.

“We’ve been able to do more and better problem solving to identify issues, contain them in the near term, [and] work to get to root cause so we can put in permanent corrective actions,” he said. “I think we’re doing that not only better, but frankly with, with greater speed, with greater urgency with the customer in mind.”