ORIX Aviation Brand Guidelines: A Dublin Lessor of 1991, an Avolon Stake & AerFin

A Japanese leasing group’s aircraft arm.

ORIX Aviation is the aircraft-leasing business of the Japanese financial group ORIX, based in Dublin. The company says it was founded in Dublin in 1991, when it set up its leasing business and began building a portfolio of aircraft, and Aviation Week gave the same year in November 2026. Its legal name is ORIX Aviation Systems Limited, and its press releases describe it as a wholly owned subsidiary of ORIX Corporation of Japan.

The parent is much older. English Wikipedia says ORIX was established on 17 April 1964 as Orient Leasing, originally a subsidiary of the trading house Nichimen, now Sojitz, and took the name ORIX in 1989. ORIX itself says it began expanding outside Japan in 1971, and today describes a group active in financing and investment, life insurance, banking, asset management, real estate, energy, vehicles, ships and aircraft. It is listed on the Tokyo and New York stock exchanges, as Aviation Business News noted in 2026.

ORIX Aviation’s own timeline gives the main steps. It entered its first Japanese leveraged lease in 2000 and began co-investing in joint ventures in 2005. In 2020 it moved into a new purpose-built office in Ballsbridge, and in 2022 it opened an office in Dubai. It now lists offices in Dublin, Dubai and Tokyo and a team of more than 100 aviation professionals.

Owning, managing and selling aircraft.

The company describes its business as resting on four parts: the aircraft it owns; joint ventures; asset-management services, including the Japanese Operating Lease, managed aircraft and remarketing; and an investment arm called ORIX Aviation Capital for aviation-related stakes. It is an operating lessor, leasing aircraft to airlines for a set term, but much of its work is selling aircraft to investors and then looking after them. In its own words, it focuses mainly on investing and trading in aircraft leasing and aircraft asset management, while keeping a balance sheet of owned aircraft to support stable long-term profits.

The Japanese Operating Lease, often shortened to JOL, is a structure in which Japanese investors own aircraft that are leased to airlines. ORIX Aviation says that over the last ten years it has sold aircraft to more than 100 JOL investors and continues to manage those aircraft after the sale, with a number of repeat investors. Its asset-management clients, it says, are investors in Japan, US funds and international banks and financial investors.

The company makes a point of outside checks on that work. It says that in 2003 it obtained a ranking from S&P for its asset-management services, the first aircraft lessor to do so by its own account, and that in 2015 S&P raised the ranking to its highest level, “Strong” with a stable outlook, which it says was reaffirmed in September 2024.

As of 31 March 2026, the company said, it owned and managed more than 230 aircraft leased to more than 60 airlines in more than 40 countries; its home page gives a fleet of over 250. Its fleet page lists narrowbody aircraft in the largest numbers: 62 Airbus A320ceo-family and 53 A320neo-family aircraft, 60 Boeing 737NG-family and 37 Boeing 737 MAX-family aircraft, alongside a smaller number of Boeing and Airbus widebodies.

How aircraft lessors present themselves.

Aircraft lessors sell nothing to the travelling public. They buy commercial jets, lease them to airlines and sell them on, so their identities are built for airlines, lenders and investors rather than passengers. Their websites tend to open with a short line of figures — aircraft owned and managed, airline customers, countries — dated to the end of a reporting quarter, as Aircastle and Aviation Capital Group both do.

The aircraft themselves carry other companies’ colours. A lessor’s jet flies in its customer’s livery, so the photographs on lessors’ sites and in their press releases show airlines’ paint schemes rather than the lessor’s own. Aviation Capital Group announced in September 2026, for example, that it had delivered the first Boeing 737-8 in Trinity Airways’ new identity. Fleet pages list aircraft by type, and order-book pages count commitments from the manufacturers years ahead.

Customer pages are often walls of airline logos, sometimes grouped by region, and services pages explain the business in plain terms: operating leases, sale-and-leaseback deals in which a lessor buys an airline’s new aircraft and leases it back, trading in mid-life aircraft, and managing aircraft for other owners. Engines are a business of their own; trade reports describe lessors balancing engine use across their fleets, and some groups plan to expand into engine leasing.

Many of these companies are owned by banks, trading houses or investment firms, and their investor pages — results, fact sheets, credit ratings and bond reports — carry as much weight as the leasing pages. For the guides in this group we use navy, teal and silver tones with sans and serif stand-ins, an unofficial interpretation chosen for a finance-led sector; no company’s logo, livery or photograph is reproduced.

Avolon, then AerFin.

Two deals have widened the business beyond its own fleet. In November 2018, English Wikipedia’s article on Avolon says, ORIX acquired a 30% stake in Avolon, the Dublin lessor, from its shareholder Bohai Capital, part of China’s HNA Group; ORIX Aviation’s timeline records the purchase that year, along with the appointment of James Meyler as chief executive. ORIX Aviation describes itself as the holder of that stake, and does not count Avolon’s aircraft in its own fleet value.

The second deal took it into aircraft parts. On 3 August 2026 ORIX Aviation announced an agreement to buy all the shares of AerFin, a UK aviation-aftermarket company established in 2010 that takes apart aircraft and engines, manages components and sells or leases used serviceable parts. On 2 November 2026 it said the purchase was complete after regulatory approvals. Aviation Week reported the next day that AerFin, founded by Bob James and based near Newport in Wales, with more than 230 staff and facilities in Miami, Singapore and Dublin, had been bought from the Danish private-equity firm CataCap, its majority shareholder since 2019, and that financial terms were not disclosed. ORIX Aviation says AerFin will keep its own brand.

The company publishes no brand guidelines. Its website loads Roboto, an open-source sans typeface, and presents the business through figures, a fleet page and a customer map rather than through a slogan; the ORIX group itself uses the purpose line “Finding Paths. Making Impact.”

For a design guide, ORIX Aviation shows how a lessor can carry a parent’s name and stay quiet about itself, letting fleet figures and investor relationships do the talking. Compare Avolon, in which it holds a 30% stake, and SMBC Aviation Capital, another Dublin lessor with a Japanese owner. For this guide we use a harbour navy and an amber with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep ORIX Aviation’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.