Nordex earned a better margin last quarter maintaining turbines than building them. Service EBIT margin, 19.2 percent. Projects, 12.2 percent.
Vestas shows the same split. Its service agreements add up to 39.8 billion euros of expected future contractual revenue, and Service earned a 16.3 percent EBIT margin in Q1 against 3.2 percent for the group.
Now look at how MENA buys wind. Dumat Al Jandal, Saudi Arabia’s first utility-scale wind farm, went up with 99 Vestas V150s and a 20-year Active Output Management service agreement with the manufacturer attached. The project was forecast to create 800 construction jobs and 150 posts for operations and maintenance. We bought the turbines. Someone else booked the twenty years after.
Aviation worked this out here a long time ago. Global maintenance, repair and overhaul spend hit 136 billion dollars in 2025 and heads toward 193 billion by the end of the decade. The Middle East’s commercial fleet grows 5 percent a year through 2036, the fastest in the world after India’s. My read is that the fleet pulled hangars, licences and technicians in behind it.
Wind’s version of that base is still being drawn. GWO and GWEC put global technician demand at 628,000 by 2030 to service a 2.1 terawatt fleet, and their outlook profiles six markets in depth: Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, India and the United States.
Every megawatt this region commissions generates a twenty-year service bill. I would like more of those invoices written locally.
