Aerospace supply chain report 2025: Is the crisis over?

By Eric Kirstetter, Stephan Baur and Robert Thomson

Our 2025 survey on the health of the aerospace industry finds that ramp-up readiness and resilience have improved since 2024, suggesting companies may have turned a corner when it comes to meeting delivery and other targets. The report also makes a series of recommendations on how firms can maintain the push and where to direct efforts.

The global aerospace and defense supply chain has been under enormous pressure over the past few years. Crises ranging from the Covid pandemic to material shortages and high interest rates have caused unprecedented disruption, with planned deliveries of aircraft and engines severely reduced. Companies have been working hard to address the challenges, setting ambitious rate ramp-up targets to get the industry back on track as soon as possible. The question is, are they succeeding?

Since 2023, Roland Berger has conducted an aerospace supply chain resilience report to find out. Based on a survey of dozens of key industry players, it assesses the current health and future readiness of the supply chain, as well as outlining key priorities and identifying potential measures for improvement for OEMs and suppliers.

The 2025 report makes several notable findings. The most significant is that the industry may now be turning a corner – the supply chain crisis seems to have stabilized, with resilience increasing and disruption severity decreasing. To ensure progress is sustained, recommendations include optimizing the supply chain setup to improve resilience against future geopolitical disruption.

Key findings

The 2025 survey, which was again conducted in collaboration with the aerospace industry associations of the UK, Germany and France (ADS, BDLI and GIFAS), focused on three areas:

Ramp-up readiness

As in the 2024 survey, most aerospace companies still lack key resources to support the production ramp-up. At 65%, personnel shortages were the most commonly cited challenge, with little change compared to 2024. The number of respondents citing missing production capacity (34%) was also flat.

There was a significant increase in the perception of ramp-up readiness. Almost 70% of companies now believe they are either well-prepared or very well-prepared for the rate ramp-up, compared to half that figure in 2024. However, financing is emerging as a growing concern, with 49% of respondents now citing a lack of financial resources as a challenge, up from 41% in 2024. This highlights that, despite improved confidence in operational readiness, financial constraints could pose a risk to sustaining or accelerating the production ramp-up.

Overall, this indicates that the industry has now turned a corner, although it may take until 2026 before production rates improve.

Supply chain resilience

Almost two-thirds of companies (64%) are facing a supply chain disruption, only a two-percentage point improvement in 2024. The main reasons given for disruptions were largely unchanged – increased lead times and limited availability of raw material and semi-finished goods. Companies not affected by supply-chain disruptions gave reasons such as improved stock/inventory management, improved demand forecasts and good supplier relations. However, the level of very severe disruptions has fallen, with the most severe disruptions concentrated at Tier-1 and Tier-3+ levels.

Meanwhile, the number of companies in the stabilization stage of achieving resilience has increased. Supply-chain maturity has also improved since 2024, especially with respect to organization, skills, resources and capabilities.

Innovation & AI

The majority of companies (65%) already use or plan to use AI and other innovative software tools, with use cases focusing on quality inspection and cybersecurity. However, their use is limited in most cases to less than 10% of business processes. The main reasons for not using AI-based tools are a lack experience (chosen by 61% of respondents) and problems integrating with existing systems (53%). A total of 64% of companies are experiencing a rise in the threat of cyberattacks.

Next steps

After analyzing the survey findings, the report offers a series of conclusions. These include that measures introduced by aerospace companies in the last few years to improve supply chain resilience are now starting to pay off. It goes on to consider where efforts should now be directed, and actions that could help support moves toward a more resilience supply chain. One recommendation is to work with industry association initiatives, such as “AeroExcellence International”, to share best practices along the supply chain.

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