GE Aerospace to Pay $11.75 Billion for Castings Supplier CPP, Its Biggest Deal Since 2024 Spinoff

GE Aerospace announced on September 8 that it agreed to acquire Consolidated Precision Products, known as CPP, for $11.75 billion. This is the largest acquisition GE Aerospace has made since it became a standalone public company in 2024, following the breakup of the old General Electric conglomerate.

The seller is private equity. GE is buying CPP from Warburg Pincus and Berkshire Partners, according to Aviation Week and the Epoch Times. GE Aerospace has been a CPP customer for more than 15 years and, per The Motley Fool, the company already supplies about 25% of GE's casting needs.

What CPP Actually Makes

CPP is based in Cleveland, Ohio, founded in 1991, and employs roughly 6,600 people across more than 20 facilities, according to Aviation Insights. The company pours superalloy, titanium, aluminum, magnesium and steel into precision castings used in commercial and military aircraft engines, helicopters, weapons systems and industrial gas turbines.

These aren't simple parts. Some turbine blades are cast as a single continuous metal crystal with no internal grain boundaries, which lets them survive extreme heat, the Epoch Times reported. Qualifying a new foundry to make a flight-critical part like that can take years, not quarters, according to Aviation Insights. That scarcity is exactly why GE is paying up to own one outright.

GE expects CPP to generate roughly $2 billion in revenue in 2027. Sources differ slightly on the exact revenue split: Yahoo Finance reported about 70% of CPP's revenue comes from commercial and defense engines combined, while The Daily Upside broke it down as roughly 60% commercial aerospace and 20% defense. Either way, the bulk of CPP's business already sits squarely in GE's core markets.

The Price Tag and the Bet

GE is financing the deal with $7 billion in cash and the remainder, roughly $4.75 billion, through new debt, according to Aviation Week. GE Aerospace CEO Larry Culp said the company does not expect antitrust barriers to closing, though The Motley Fool noted the deal will still face antitrust scrutiny and concerns over fair competition given how few global suppliers exist for this kind of casting.

The valuation is steep by any measure. GE is paying about 26 times CPP's projected 2027 EBITDA before accounting for synergies, or about 18 times including the net synergies GE expects to extract, Aviation Week reported.

Culp defended the price directly to Aviation Week: "We're excited for at least three reasons: One being just the opportunity to invest in a mission-critical commodity, casting, in terms of the capacity that's required to support the strong demand across commercial new-make, the aftermarket and defense into the 2030s." He added the deal also has a technology angle, aimed at improving airfoil performance at higher temperatures for both current and next-generation engines.

CPP CEO James Stewart called GE "a great partner... for many years" and said CPP is "excited to further strengthen this long-standing relationship."

Why the Bottleneck Matters

For three years, the commercial engine business has had the same problem: order books stretching to the end of the decade, and factories that can't keep up, according to Aviation Insights. GE Aerospace's own backlog now tops $210 billion, including more than $170 billion in commercial services, per Yahoo Finance. LEAP engines that power the Airbus A320neo and Boeing 737 MAX families have been especially constrained by parts shortages.

CPP will keep serving other big names after the deal closes. The Daily Upside reported CPP intends to maintain a significant book of third-party business with Honeywell, RTX and Lockheed Martin. That matters for the defense industrial base broadly, given NATO members last year pledged to lift defense spending to 5% of GDP by 2035, roughly $3 trillion annually, up from the old 2% target, per figures cited by The Daily Upside.

The same casting shortage has spilled into the AI boom. Elon Musk said SpaceX is building its own foundry in Bastrop, Texas, to manufacture turbine blades as its AI operations run short on power turbines, according to the Epoch Times. That's a separate company solving the identical bottleneck GE just spent $11.75 billion to buy its way out of.

What Happens Next

GE says the deal will be accretive to adjusted earnings per share and free cash flow in its first year after closing, and that it isn't changing its buyback or dividend plans, according to Aviation Week. Culp told the outlet GE will still spend hundreds of millions of dollars later on integration-related capital expenditures.

The deal isn't expected to close until the second half of 2027, pending regulatory approval, giving competitors, customers and antitrust regulators more than a year to weigh in. Whether GE can actually raise CPP's factory yields fast enough to turn that $210 billion backlog into delivered engines, rather than just a bigger balance sheet, remains to be seen.