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We've spun the wheel for the North America bucket. The ticker has landed in Hollywood, Florida, on a company that has been quietly compounding for 35 years on one of the most counterintuitive business ideas in the aerospace industry.

Before we dive in, a reminder of what the index itself has delivered over time.

Every week, we pull one company at random from the FTSE All-World with ~4,200 companies representing 90% of global stock market wealth. We share the index's long-term returns as a reminder of why we're here: the long game. New to the newsletter? Start here.

Founded in 1957 in Hollywood, Florida. Relisted on the NYSE.

The next time you board a commercial flight, there is a reasonable chance that somewhere on that plane, inside the engine, in the hydraulic system, behind the instrument panel, is a part that was not made by Boeing, GE, or Pratt & Whitney. It was made by HEICO. It was approved by the FAA as functionally equivalent to the original. And the airline paid roughly half the price.

Most passengers have never heard of HEICO. Almost every airline in the world has.

A few key facts:

When Laurans Mendelson took control of HEICO in 1990, it was a small, unremarkable holding company with $26 million in annual revenue. He had one idea: the FAA runs a programme called Parts Manufacturer Approval, or PMA. It allows independent manufacturers to reverse-engineer OEM aircraft replacement parts, prove to the FAA they are functionally equivalent or better, and then sell them legally to airlines at whatever price they choose.

General Electric, Pratt & Whitney, and Rolls Royce had long treated the aftermarket as their profit centre. New aircraft are sold at thin margins. The spare parts that keep them flying for thirty years are where the real money is. A single fuel nozzle or turbine seal can cost ten times what it costs to make. Nobody had seriously challenged this until HEICO.

Mendelson did. HEICO engineers would study a part in service, design their own version from scratch, run it through the FAA's certification process, and come out the other side with a part that costs airlines 30 to 50% less and carries the same FAA stamp.

The FAA has never found a material safety issue with a HEICO part. Not once in 35 years.

Today HEICO holds approximately 20,000 FAA-approved part designs and adds roughly 500 new ones every year. That library took decades to build and an army of engineers to maintain. A competitor starting today would be starting 35 years behind. HEICO notably holds no material patents, and its moat is trade secrets, engineering expertise, and the kind of institutional relationship with the FAA that only comes from a clean, long record.

There is one other detail worth knowing: Lufthansa Technik, the technical arm of Lufthansa and one of the world's largest aircraft maintenance providers, owns 20% of HEICO's flight support business. That gives HEICO a window into what European airline maintenance actually needs.

HEICO runs two divisions.

The Flight Support Group is the original business: PMA parts, aircraft component repair and overhaul, and distribution. In FY2025 it generated $3.1 billion in revenue at a 24% operating margin. Revenue grew 18% last year, and the division has now achieved more than 20 consecutive quarters of sequential growth.

The Electronic Technologies Group designs and makes specialised electronic components for aerospace, defence, space, and medical applications: guidance systems, power supplies, missile electronics, cockpit displays, satellite components, and more. These are products where failure in operation is simply not an option. It contributed $1.4 billion in revenue at a 23% operating margin in FY2025.

The two divisions balance each other. When commercial air travel slows, defence spending tends to hold. When defence budgets tighten, air travel picks up. In practice, both have been growing strongly for years.

The latest quarterly results, reported in late May 2026, were striking. Net income rose 49% year-on-year to $234 million. Revenue was up 25% to $1.4 billion, with 18% of that coming from organic growth, meaning the existing business growing, not just acquisitions. Operating margin expanded to 25.5%.

Victor Mendelson, co-CEO, described the business as "firing on all engines."

Since 1990, HEICO has completed approximately 107 acquisitions. The model is unusual. HEICO typically buys 80 to 90% of a business, leaving the remaining stake with the founders. The founders stay. The business runs as it always did, just with HEICO's capital behind it and its customer relationships opening new doors.

This is deliberately not a cost-cutting exercise. HEICO is buying engineering expertise and FAA approvals and customer trust that took decades to build. The way to protect all of that is to keep the people who built it.

The most recent deals give a flavour of what this looks like in practice. In February 2026, HEICO's Wencor subsidiary acquired a company called EthosEnergy, which repairs components for industrial gas turbines, engines used in power generation including the kind of fast-expanding infrastructure supporting AI data centres. In April 2026, it bought 80% of Sherwood Avionics near Miami's Opa-locka Airport, a specialist in maintenance and overhaul for military aircraft including the C-130, F-15, F-16, and UH-60 Black Hawk. Sherwood's founder retained the other 20% and continues to run the business.

$100 invested in HEICO common stock in October 1990, with dividends reinvested, was worth $128,481 by October 2025.

The NYSE Composite over the same period: $100 to $1,221.

Revenue grew from $26 million to $4.5 billion. Net income grew from $2 million to $690 million. Both compounded at roughly 17% per year for 35 years.

An aviation parts supplier operating out of two offices in South Florida, making components that most passengers will never see or think about. It is also, alongside the trash hauler we covered in Waste Connections and the salvage yard operator in Copart, another reminder that the most durable businesses in this index are often the ones doing unglamorous work that nobody else wants to figure out how to do.

Laurans Mendelson, who built this from nothing, died in September 2025. A few weeks later, HEICO reported its best year ever. His two sons, Eric and Victor, who had been running the two divisions for nearly three decades, stepped up as co-chairmen without missing a beat.

The machine kept running.

HEICO is in every global and North American index fund. We had no idea it was in there. Do you fly? You've probably already flown on their parts.

Data and images sourced from HEICO FY2025 Annual Report (fiscal year ended October 31, 2025) and HEICO Q2 FY2026 (quarter ended April 30, 2026).

Next week, we'll be looking at a company from Europe.