GAMECO Brand Guidelines: Guangzhou’s 1989 China Southern–Hutchison Maintenance Venture

An airline, a Hong Kong group and a ceremony in 1989.

GAMECO is the acronym of Guangzhou Aircraft Maintenance Engineering Company Limited, in Chinese 广州飞机维修工程有限公司, a maintenance, repair and overhaul company at Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport. Its own history page says China’s Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations and Trade approved the plan in June 1989 and that a ceremony marked the company’s establishment on 28 October 1989; English Wikipedia gives the same founding date. It received its Chinese CCAR-145 maintenance certificate in September 1990 and an American FAR-145 repair station certificate the following month, the company says, and began formal operation on 28 November 1990.

It was a joint venture from the start. English Wikipedia names the founding partners as China Southern Airlines, Hutchison Aircraft Maintenance Investment and South China International Aircraft Engineering, and AviTrader used the same three names in November 2013. The company’s history adds a change of shape: at the end of 2002 one shareholder sold its 25 per cent stake, and since then China Southern Airlines and Hutchison Whampoa (China) have each held half. GAMECO says Hutchison Whampoa (China) is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Hong Kong group CK Hutchison, and English Wikipedia lists the owners as China Southern and CK Hutchison, at 50 per cent each.

China Southern is also its main customer. GAMECO says it provides almost all of the airline’s line, base and component maintenance, and English Wikipedia calls the airline its biggest customer.

Three hangars and two conversion lines.

The company tells its early history as a series of firsts in mainland China, each in its own words: a D check on a Boeing 737 for Xiamen Airlines in March 1991, which it calls the first completed in mainland China; a European JAR-145 approval in March 1998; and, in June 2006, what it calls the first conversion of a Boeing 737-300 from passenger aircraft to freighter in mainland China. In October 2006 Viva Macau became its first outside airline to contract full maintenance and engineering, and from January 2007 it handled line maintenance for FedEx at Subic Bay in the Philippines and at Baiyun. It moved to the new Baiyun airport in August 2004 and opened a base in Chongqing, with Chongqing Airlines, in April 2011.

Its hangars mark the later stages. English Wikipedia describes the Phase I hangar’s main hall as large enough for four wide-body or twelve narrow-body aircraft, with a separate paint hangar for one A380 or 747. AviTrader reported in November 2013 that the Phase II hangar had opened south of it, with eight bays for narrow-body aircraft and a height of 29.8 metres. In January 2022 Aviation Business News reported that the Phase III hangar was complete, with a maintenance hall of 34,000 square metres and a span of 334 metres, able to take six wide-body and five narrow-body aircraft at once; a China Southern A380 and a 747 were towed in to mark the occasion. English Wikipedia, citing Aviation Week, says the magazine ranked GAMECO sixth in its top-ten airframe maintenance list for 2014.

GAMECO also converts passenger jets to freighters with Boeing. China Daily reported in September 2020 that GAMECO had started its first 737-800 Boeing Converted Freighter line in June that year and that the two companies planned a second line for 2021. In February 2025 CAAS International reported the delivery of the 100th 767-300BCF conversion to SF Airlines at the Phase III hangar. Long-haul airlines use it too: AviTrader reported in December 2025 that Emirates, which began an A380 heavy maintenance line with GAMECO in September 2023 and added a Boeing 777 line in April 2025, had signed new multi-year agreements extending both.

How MRO providers present themselves.

Aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul companies, known in the trade as MRO providers, sell work that passengers rarely see. Their public pages tend to start with the places where that work is done: hangars photographed with aircraft inside, often in the liveries of the airlines that own the maintenance company or send their fleets to it, shown as the companies publish them.

The second common element is the capability list. Providers set out what they can handle by aircraft type and by engine type, and by level of work, from line checks between flights to heavy base checks, component overhaul and passenger-to-freighter conversion. GAMECO’s website, for example, names the Boeing, Airbus, Embraer and COMAC types it works on one by one.

Approvals are usually stated plainly rather than designed. A maintenance organisation’s certificates from the European Union Aviation Safety Agency, the US Federal Aviation Administration, the Civil Aviation Administration of China and other national authorities tend to appear as a named list, sometimes with the certificate type beside each authority. Hangar sizes, bay counts and staff numbers appear the same way, as figures in company statements that trade titles such as Aviation Week and AviTrader then report.

The rest of a typical MRO site speaks to two audiences. Airlines and aircraft lessors looking for capacity are addressed through customer, news and contact pages, where new contracts and hangar openings are announced; technicians and engineers looking for work are addressed through careers pages. Many of these companies belong to an airline, or are joint ventures with one, so the parent’s name often sits close to the provider’s own.

An acronym in capitals.

The name is an acronym of the English company name, set in capitals, and the Chinese name spells out the same words: Guangzhou, aircraft, maintenance, engineering. The website presents the company in the plain terms of the trade. It names its approvals as a list — as a maintenance organisation by the Civil Aviation Administration of China, the FAA and EASA; as a design organisation by CAAC and under EASA Part 21; as a training organisation under CCAR-147 and EASA Part 147 — and lists the aircraft it works on by name, from Boeing 737 to 787, Airbus A300 to A380, the Embraer E190 and COMAC’s C909 and C919.

Its branches are listed the same way: Chongqing, Qingyuan, where the company says it overhauls landing gear for the A320, A330, 737 and 777, a component repair base, a parts manufacturing centre, a team at Shanghai Pudong, a station at Beijing Daxing and a branch for Australia and New Zealand. The services it names run from line and base maintenance to cabin work, painting, freighter conversion and training.

The ownership has stayed stable for more than two decades: China Southern Airlines and a Hong Kong conglomerate, each with half since 2002, with Guangzhou as the base and China Southern’s fleet as the core of the work.

For a design guide, GAMECO shows how a joint venture can present itself through facilities, approvals and aircraft types rather than a story of founders. Compare China Southern Airlines, its shareholder and main customer, and Ameco, another airline-linked maintenance joint venture in China. For this guide we use a deep teal, an ink and a brass with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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