Across our State of the Aftermarket 2025 dataset, OEM leaders are signaling a clear shift in expectations. Many organizations that today generate 10–29% of revenue from parts and service expect that share to rise to 30–49% within five years. At the same time, 81% of respondents plan to increase aftermarket investment, with one in five expecting investment growth above 15%.
Those numbers reflect a strategic bet: that the aftermarket will provide a stabilizing source of revenue, margin protection, and customer retention in an increasingly volatile operating environment.
But the same research reveals a harder reality.
The leaders responsible for delivering that growth are not yet equipped to do it with confidence. Not because the ambition is unrealistic, but because the systems they depend on are often fragmented or only partially connected.
The data tells the story clearly.
External pressure is intensifying. Competition remains the most frequently cited concern, while cost volatility, supply disruption, and rising service expectations continue to reshape the operating environment.
Yet the capability needed to absorb that pressure remains uneven.
Across the dataset, most organizations sit in the middle of the maturity curve — beyond fully manual planning, but not yet operating with consistently proactive or autonomous decision models. 81% do not yet have real-time, well-integrated data across core functions. And while AI adoption is expanding, its use remains concentrated in analytical, rather than executional use cases.
This is the aftermarket readiness gap.
It is not a gap in awareness. Leaders clearly recognize the importance of strengthening aftermarket performance. The gap lies elsewhere: between the revenue expectations being placed on the aftermarket and the operational maturity needed to support them.
When planning remains reactive and data fragmented, decisions across inventory, pricing, service, and supply must be reconciled sequentially rather than concurrently. As a result, trade-offs take longer to resolve, margin exposure grows, and the stability the aftermarket is expected to provide becomes harder to sustain.
This shows up in the interactions between everyday decisions. A pricing campaign may launch without visibility into inventory or service demand, pushing demand toward parts that are already constrained. Or a part may be underpriced relative to its availability, eroding margin while increasing the risk of stockouts. What begins as a well-intentioned commercial or planning decision can ripple across the aftermarket — reducing availability, creating delays for customers, and opening the door for competing suppliers.
And that is not how organizations reach a target where the aftermarket represents half of total revenue.
In the coming weeks, we’ll look more closely at what’s actually creating this gap — where pressure is building across industries, how companies are responding differently to tariffs and cost volatility, why planning maturity varies so widely, and how fragmented data and early-stage AI adoption shape the decisions leaders can make.
The goal is not simply to diagnose the problem, but to make it clearer where leaders should focus if they want the aftermarket to deliver the resilience and growth they are now counting on.
Explore the full State of the Aftermarket 2025 research to understand the broader findings and implications.