Rolls-Royce in Japan
In this session Susumu Kaminaga - President of Rolls-Royce Japan Co. Ltd. - will give an overview of Rolls-Royce in Japan, highlighting the key role of supply chain and partners in Japan to the current and future success of Rolls-Royce.
Transcript
Susumu Kaminaga:We thought this event, CAPA, held in Japan, is one of the best opportunities we talk about what we do in Japan, the breadth and depth of our connection with the Japan market. So I'd like to show a little bit more than what you may know about our products, our engines. So obviously our civil aircraft engines plays a big part of our business in Japan. And to just give you an idea, 2025, we had 169,000 flights in and out of Japan with Rolls-Royce engines powering. Wow. And that is including our domestic flights, with our partners in Japan. So obviously many of you are here for the civil aerospace business, but we go a lot more beyond that. So this is our company portfolio, and we have been talking about the civil aerospace business, and we provide our engines to the wide-body market here in Japan, but some more of the business aviation engines. So you know a lot about that, but we serve other markets as well, the defense and nuclear. So we have been a very, very long partner with Japanese Defense Forces, possibly longer than civil aerospace actually. So a lot of our engines support Japanese transport and patrol aircraft. But even further, there's a lot of naval vessels that's powered with Rolls-Royce gas turbine engines. So combined, we actually have more gas— Rolls-Royce-powered gas turbine engines in the defense compared to, like, the UK forces combined. So that is very, very important. partner and market for us. So we have been providing a lot of transport naval products, but we are also working on combat as well. So this is next-generation fighter aircraft that Japan, UK, and Italy are developing together, and we are playing our part of developing the engines to serve and protect these nations. And then the power systems at the bottom. This is our diesel engine business. So historically, this has, this division have served a lot of the marine diesel engines and also construction machines. But more recently, there's a very, very high demand on data center and data center backup power generation systems. So there's, it was not only a few times, practically all of our sessions today talked about AI and behind the scenes of AI, there's data centers, AI data centers that where we support with our diesel engine backup systems to make sure that AI continues to run. But then the AI will consume so much energy that we are also thinking about different ways of supporting the energy demand that will come in the future, which is partly the BESS system. So BESS, that's battery energy storage system. So that will enable the management of the power demands and also support emergency backups to the data center big systems and also to support the wider grid network. It may be less known that Rolls-Royce have nuclear capability as well, but our mission is to support the power, the demand to serve the society, and we are now using that nuclear capability which we originally developed and still serving the UK submarine fleet to a civil application, where we have the small modular reactor business that is already on the right track to, with contracts in the UK, and also some more progressing contracts in Europe as well. So that's, the technology is relatively conventional, but we're going to make it modular, truly modular, and fast delivery with the SAFE technology. Further beyond that, we have advanced modular reactor technology that we're working on. This is more SAFE Generation 4 nuclear reactors, what we call, which will have more agile applications, more safe, to support the, the further energy demand And also, especially in a country like Japan where we import majority of our primary energy, it will provide us with more resilient energy security. And this AMR, we have very recently signed a memorandum of cooperation with Japanese research institute JAEA on transfer of technology. for our products. So very, very closely across our portfolio, we are working closely with Japan. So I mentioned we have been working with Japan a very long time. In fact, more than 60 years we have established our presence in Japan and working together. Some of the key big projects that we have worked together is The iconic YS-11 aircraft that was indigenously developed airliner, uh, you know, back in the '70s, '80s, uh, that was powered with Rolls-Royce Dart engines. And then, uh, Lockheed, um, TriStar aircraft, which once was a flagship fleet in ANA. Which was also powered with Rolls-Royce RB211 engines. And then RJ500 engine research and technology program, maybe less known with that name, but it was an original Japan-UK technology collaboration to study high bypass ratio engine, which evolved into the successful V2500 engine. that is now supporting a big fleet of Airbus A320 family. And then as mentioned in the previous slide, we have a very, very big fleet of air and naval defense vehicles that is being powered with Rolls-Royce gas turbine engines. Thank you, Susumu. The supply chain is also a big part of our partnership in Japan. So these are just some examples of who we work with in the Japanese network. And you can see the diversity and the depth of the supply chain that we rely on, that will serve and then eventually come together at Derby as a Trent engine. So in total, including our big partners, risk and revenue sharing partners, and the suppliers, raw material suppliers, around 20% of the Rolls-Royce modern Trent engines are supplied in one way or form from Japan. So that is a significant part of our partnership on our supply chain side. And what is unique with the partnership and the supply chain in Japan is that they are not just part suppliers. These companies that we work with, they are not only providing parts, but they invest into our programs. So we operate the programs together, the Trent programs together. Like KHI, they have responsibility of a module, the intermediate compressor module, and we have been working for more than 40 years. MHI, as a group company, we have very, very long history supplying our engines to the aircraft that they design, but also in the aero engine space, they have participated in risk and revenue sharing partnership And that has been going on successfully for over 20 years now. IHI, also a very, very long-term partner to our Trent engines, but more recently, they are our key partners, key interfaces in the GCAP program. So that is the new fighter aircraft, Global Combat Aircraft program. that we work with both on defense and the civil side. Of course, we have our very, very important airline customers operating our aircraft as well. ANA with Trent 1000 and Boeing 787 combination, they have been the launch partner and the biggest Trent fleet operator globally. And also a little bit more recently, Japan Airlines have now started incorporating A350 fleet, and we're very proud, proud to support their flagship routes domestically and also internationally. And not to forget the very, very iconic total livery A380 fleet that ANA operates between Tokyo and Honolulu. Then looking into the future, we are working on UltraFan technologies. So this is a new high bypass ratio gust turbine engines which will enable both sustainability and efficiency for the next-generation aircraft. So the engine itself is already proved to run effectively on 100% SAF fuel at our testbed. And we have demonstrated the large engines, which is scaled for the widebody. But we have said from the outset that this engine can be scaled, this technology can be scaled. So we are going to prove what we said, that this is scalable to make a technology demonstrator engines at the scale that is suitable for narrowbody. And we will look to reenter the narrowbody we once paused after the— we have departed from the— 2010s. IAE consortium with the V2500 engine. So we're very excited with these new engines, and with new engines, new technologies comes with new requirements for the components. So this is not just looking towards the customers for better products, but also looking towards Japanese supply chain to explore more possibilities of working together on new materials, new ways of making things, and making the aircraft industry, the airline industries even more prosperous. So I can go on for hours, but I think this is about time for me to close my introduction of Rolls-Royce and our connection with Japan. And we're very proud to host the evening dinner this evening at the Sapporo Museum and Factory. So looking forward to see you there this evening. Thank you very much. Thank you.
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