Full backlog.
Frozen prices. Squeezed margin.
Aerospace suppliers are living the widest input-cost / price gap of any industry we track. The order book says boom; the P&L says otherwise. The difference is contract structure — and it is fixable.
Aerospace input costs rose +30.2% year-over-year while selling prices moved just +1.4%
Margin Squeeze Index™ — Crisis band
Input costs, year-over-year
Producer selling prices, year-over-year
modeled annual margin erosion for a $75M supplier at 72% COGS
Exhibit — ADEXMA Margin Squeeze Index™, aerospace & defense, June 2026 · built on federal producer-price and commodity data
Readings above +10 are rare and signal structural disruption — tariffs, allocation, commodity shock. Aerospace is there now. A gap this wide does not close on its own; it closes contract by contract, clause by clause.
Four structural forces squeeze aerospace suppliers — all four live in contracts, not on the shop floor
Your LTAs froze prices. Your inputs didn't freeze.
Long-term agreements signed three years ago fixed pricing for program life — then titanium, superalloys, and castings repriced under tariffs and allocation. Without escalation clauses tied to a published index, every month of an old LTA is margin you volunteered away. Contract re-openers exist; most suppliers never invoke them.
Qualification makes you captive — in both directions
First-article inspection, NADCAP special processes, and source approval mean switching a supplier takes 12–24 months. Your buyers know they can't leave you easily — and your primes know you can't walk away from the program. Pricing power exists at requalification and rate-change moments. Most suppliers price as if it never does.
The backlog hides the margin problem
Record OEM build rates and a multi-year defense cycle mean order books are full. Full backlog at yesterday's prices is not health — it is compressed margin, contractually scheduled. The time to reprice is while demand is strong, not after the rate break.
Compliance cost is real — and rarely priced
AS9100 quality systems, ITAR controls, counterfeit-part traceability, and customer flow-downs add structural cost that commercial-industrial competitors don't carry. If your quotes don't recover that burden explicitly, your compliance discipline is a discount you give away.
Margin Architecture™ for aerospace reads your LTAs, your quals, and your rate schedule — not a generic checklist
Pricing
- LTA audit: escalation clauses, re-opener triggers, index linkage vs. actual input inflation
- Spares and MRO pricing — aftermarket parts priced off stale catalogs are the most common leak
- Tariff and surcharge pass-through design that procurement will actually accept
Supply Chain
- Buffer strategy for allocated materials — titanium, fasteners, castings, forgings
- Rate-readiness: capacity and inventory positioned against published OEM rate breaks
- Supplier risk mapping down the sub-tier chain, where most AOG surprises start
Sales
- Quote discipline on new program bids — priced for program life, not for entry
- Win/loss on RFQs you chose to walk from: the no-bid decision as a margin lever
- Customer concentration economics when one prime is half your revenue
We work both sides of the Atlantic supply chain
Aerospace is a French-American industry — engines, fuselage sections, and equipment cross the Atlantic in both directions, and so do tariffs. ADEXMA's principal serves as Honorary Consul of France in Cleveland and leads Ohio delegations to the Paris and Farnborough air shows, working directly with suppliers on both sides of the OEM ecosystem. When your margin problem involves a European prime, a French sub-tier, or a transatlantic duty bill, that context is already in the room.
Find out what your LTAs are really costing you
Start with the free Margin Scan — fifteen minutes, benchmarked against 1,231 scored companies — or talk to us about an aerospace-calibrated diagnostic.