Rolls-Royce boss pushes for UK taxpayer support for new jet engine | Rolls-Royce
Rolls-Royce’s chief executive pressed ministers for taxpayer support for a new jet engine on a day when the company also announced record profits and promised to repay up to £9bn to shareholders.
The £3bn engine project, designed to power smaller commercial aircraft, will allow Rolls-Royce to re-enter the lucrative short-haul flying market.
Tufan Erginbilgic said on Thursday: “It would be a strange thing not to support this”, given that Labor identified advanced manufacturing as a priority in its industrial strategy announced last summer.
Rolls-Royce has already spent more than £1bn on the project; however, it has reportedly asked the UK government to provide between £100 million and £200 million initially to develop and test the UltraFan 30 engine.
Erginbilgiç said, “There are all kinds of numbers out there. We would welcome whatever they support, but this will be a very small portion of what we spend on this program.”
Asked whether the support was necessary amid huge profits and payouts to shareholders, he claimed international rivals received “two or three times” the government support that Rolls-Royce was demanding. “We are in a competitive world, so you need to think about that,” he added.
The engine will mark Rolls-Royce’s return to the market for smaller jets, which it abandoned in 2013. Narrow-body aircraft used on daily short-haul routes make up the vast majority of commercial aircraft flying today.
Rolls-Royce’s profits rose 40% last year as the engineering firm’s recovery accelerated, helped by rising energy demand from data centres.
The company reported underlying profits of up to £3.5bn for 2025, up from £2.5bn the previous year; has also pledged to deliver up to £9bn to shareholders over the next three years through share buybacks; It delivered the biggest cash return to investors in a decade.
Erginbilgic, a former BP executive, has transformed the engine maker’s fortunes since taking office in January 2023, where he told employees the company stood on a “burning platform”.
Its profits have since increased as it cut costs, renegotiated loss-making contracts and secured better trading terms with airline customers.
The strong results published Thursday were driven in part by a surge in energy demand from data centers as tech companies race to build infrastructure to support artificial intelligence. Profits at Rolls-Royce’s power systems division, which makes generators for plants, rose 60% to £852 million last year.
But the bulk of the company’s profits still come from its civil aviation business, where there is strong demand for commercial jet engines. He also makes money while one of his engines is in the air.
It was stated that Rolls-Royce maintained more engines and benefited from better contract conditions last year, and the profit from the department increased by 41% to 2.1 billion pounds.
The company has also had to navigate turbulence caused by Donald Trump’s 2025 tariff war, even though its engines powering Boeing’s 787 passenger planes were exempted as part of the US-UK trade deal signed in May.
Erginbilgiç said that Rolls-Royce’s transformation continues with speed and intensity, “We are consistently achieving results that were not possible before our transformation.”
The company has significantly raised its forecast and now expects operating profits of between £4.9bn and £5.2bn by 2028; That’s an increase of about a third of what he had previously targeted.
Rolls-Royce has said it will return £2.5bn to shareholders this year alone as part of its long-term buyback plan. It was only last year that the company completed its first buyback in a decade, earning investors £1bn.
Last June, Rolls-Royce was chosen to build the UK’s first small nuclear reactors at Wylfa in North Wales, backed by £2.5bn of government funding. The company said it is confident the business will make money within five years.
Rolls-Royce shares rose almost 7% on Thursday morning, helping the FTSE 100 rise 18 points, or 0.15%, to a record high of 10,825 points.
