Rolls-Royce is an engine of prosperity We are unmoved by industrial success

If you’d bought £10,000 of Rolls-Royce stock at the end of January 2021 you’d now be staring at £87,610: a 776% return, outpacing even Nvidia. It’s no wonder that the stock has inspired cult-like devotion from the most online of its investors. A subsection of Reddit, /r/rycey, is a shrine to the faith of, as they call it, “Rycey”. There are photoshopped memes, praise for the company’s CEO, whom the fans have nicknamed “Turbo”, and even a community anthem, “rycey to the moon“. Thread after thread tells the same story: debts cleared, bad marriages escaped, and retirements secured. 

Given the magnificent performance of the stock, it should be little surprise that many in Reddit’s “r/rycey” community share the view of the user “globalpm-retired”. He or she put it plainly in an update two weeks ago: “I am not selling any shares, I hold it like it was one of my children.”

Every part of this story feels quintessentially American. But the memes aren’t of Joe Exotic, but Roger Moore. The man they call Turbo isn’t a silent-retreat-attending founder, but an ex-BP executive living in St John’s Wood. And the company is far from a NASDAQ darling, but a stalwart of the pale, stale, FTSE100. What these devotees call Rycey, you and I would call Rolls-Royce.

The name still conjures polished wood, hand-stitched piping, and the hum of an electric clock at 60mph: the company Charles Rolls and Henry Royce envisioned when they met at Manchester’s Midland Hotel in 1904. But today, it makes no cars, having sold the brand to BMW in the Nineties. Instead, it builds the kind of technology nations depend on but barely notice.

First, the jet engine: specifically, the advanced gas turbines that power modern commercial aviation. The company has dominated this space since the late Sixties, when it developed the RB211, its first engine built specifically for a new generation of wide-body aircraft (twin-aisle planes designed for long-haul travel). The RB211 evolved into the Trent. This is the flagship of Rolls-Royce’s current fleet of engines, and it has powered aircraft carrying over 3.5 billion passengers.

These engines are so commonplace we forget they are miracles. The XWB, the most advanced in the Trent series, inhales 1.3 tonnes of air per second — a squash court’s worth — while each of its 68 high-pressure turbine blades generates around 900 horsepower. That’s the equivalent of the entire Formula 1 grid, tripled, with extra cars to spare, strapped beneath an aeroplane wing. 

Rolls-Royce is one of only three companies on Earth that are capable of building these engines. The other two are American, making this one of Britain’s few genuinely sovereign capabilities. As a result, the company accounts for over 2% of all UK goods exports, with a footprint of 0.7% of UK GDP.

The company’s reach extends far beyond commercial aviation. Its engines lift the F-35B, the only fifth-generation fighter jet capable of vertical takeoff, as well as the Eurofighter Typhoon, Europe’s air superiority workhorse. Rolls-Royce will also keep the B-52, Nato’s largest heavy bomber, flying into the 2050s. 

At sea, the company drives the world’s most advanced warships — from the Royal Navy’s aircraft carriers to the USS Zumwalt, the US Navy’s experimental destroyer. After a recent refit, the Zumwalt became the first ship in the US Navy to be fitted with a hypersonic missile system — though the specifics of how its Rolls-Royce MT30 engines power the system remains classified.

Yet, the company’s most vital contribution to national security lies beneath the sea. In 1965, as Harold Wilson entered Downing Street and Rubber Soul hit the charts, the PWR1, Britain’s first naval nuclear reactor, went critical. Since then, Rolls-Royce has designed three generations of pressurised-water reactors, the core (quite literally) of the UK’s continuous at-sea deterrent.

Rolls-Royce remains at the frontier of nuclear engineering. The latest generation of its reactors will power Australia’s new AUKUS-class submarines, while its Small Modular Reactor programme, launched in 2021, will adapt submarine-proven technology to use on land.

Most of this power will go to homes: each of Rolls-Royce’s proposed 470-megawatt SMRs will be able to power around a million of them. But in an era where new energy demand is being driven less by households and more by the demands of hyperscale computing, the company couldn’t be better positioned: already, it’s the world’s third-largest supplier of emergency power systems to data centres.

For security reasons, its clients in this space remain undisclosed. But one is described in official materials only as a “well-known provider of search engine, web portal, and email services”. If you need to Google it, you probably already have your answer.

Despite all this, Rolls-Royce remains oddly absent from the public imagination. Perhaps that’s because we expect the companies of Britain’s future to look new, and different: not the fourth or fifth reinvention of a 100-year-old company that has experienced its fair share of challenges. 

Take the RB211: an engine so advanced it bankrupted the company in 1971, after costing $7 billion in today’s money to develop. Rolls-Royce was nationalised, only clawing its way back to private markets in 1987. Three decades later, the Trent 1000, designed for the Boeing 787 dreamliner, ran into critical durability issues, forcing an expensive redesign and a public dispute with British Airways.

To solve its financial problems, Rolls-Royce perfected a model they call power by the hour. Instead of simply selling the engines outright, their products today are sold on a subscription basis, whereby customers make payments based on their usage. 

In theory, it’s brilliant. Instead of making money only when an engine is sold, Rolls-Royce keeps earning for years. For example, the Trent 700, a three-decade-old engine, still generates revenue. Airlines keep flying it, and Rolls-Royce keeps maintaining it under long-term contracts.

However, if you wanted to design a business model to implode during a global pandemic, you’d struggle to do better. When global aviation ground to a halt in 2020, so did Rolls-Royce’s revenue, taking the company into its second existential crisis. 

Emergency measures kept it alive, but the rebuild would, it was assumed, take years. It’s here we return to r/rycey, and to the man they call Turbo: the ex-BP executive Tufan Erginbilgiç, who has been the Rolls-Royce CEO since January 2023. 

US tech companies are now so culturally dominant that our image of a CEO is almost entirely Silicon Valley-coded: athleisure by day, Loro Piana by night; a rotation of niche hobbies, and a faintly (or not so faintly) messianic presence. Despite the “Turbo” nickname, this most certainly is not Erginbilgiç.

We’ll never see Turbo writing Substack essays about the future of energy or publishing books about the fate of the West. Instead, when Erginbilgiç makes headlines, it’s usually for his brutal honesty. Most famously, in a 2022 all-hands meeting, he called Rolls-Royce a “burning platform”.

On arrival, Turbo moved fast. He replaced the company’s heads of civil aerospace and defence, and he brought in BP allies Helen McCabe (CFO) and Nicola Grady-Smith (Chief Transformation Officer): both firm favourites of r/rycey. Entire divisions — electric flight, fuel cells, and direct air capture — were sold off or shut down. Prices went up. Customer contracts were renegotiated.

Last month came the 2024 results: a financial blowout. Profits surged by 57% to £2.5 billion. Operating margins hit 13.8%. Free cash flow nearly doubled to £2.4 billion. Key turnaround targets — originally set for 2027 — are now on track to be hit this year. The company also announced a £1 billion share buyback and reinstated its first dividend since Covid.

Yet beyond the r/rycey subreddit and the writings of a handful of financial commentators, the company is little-discussed. Perhaps it’s understandable. This is not a charismatic founder story, a moonshot bet, or a desperate Hail Mary. Rather, it is a brutal return to business fundamentals: cut costs, raise margins, sell more.

And in an era where tech companies live and die by narrative, Rolls-Royce refuses to play the game of hype. According to the company website, their mission is to “build a high-performing, competitive and resilient business with profitable growth; grow sustainable free cash flow; and build a strong balance sheet and grow shareholder returns”. Not exactly Mars by 2028.

Yet Rolls-Royce embodies everything Britain claims to want — a homegrown industrial champion, a provider of sovereign capability, a builder of the hardest things in the world. Not vapourware, not hype, but physical technology of weight and consequence, positioned at the intersection of the defining forces of the next decade: energy and war.

While most moonshots exist as demos and press releases, Rolls-Royce is actually building leading-edge nuclear reactors, hypersonic-missile firing warships, and micro-reactors designed for space. Yet Britain, fixated on the next big thing, refuses to look up.

A week after Rolls-Royce’s blowout results, the Ministry of Defence announced a new partnership: not with a British firm, but with the American defence startup Anduril. The announcement caused a stir not for its substance, but for its wording: the company was described not as American, but as “Anglo-American”. The basis for this claim appears to be nothing more than the presence of a UK subsidiary. In the absence of homegrown industrial champions, the Ministry of Defence felt the need to invent one.

But the ability to build great things isn’t something Britain has lost. Instead, it’s something we’ve chosen to overlook. This is because Britain’s industrial struggles aren’t just about the obvious — energy costs, planning permission, regulatory inertia — but about a deeper failure of political imagination.

In every economic roundtable featuring ministers or government advisers, the same question is, at some point, inevitably asked: What would it take to create a trillion-dollar company in the UK? But before we even ask that, perhaps we should start with a simpler one: If we had one, would we even notice?

Simone Weil wrote: “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them, but by waiting for them.” And yet, when we imagine Britain’s economic future, we picture something new, disruptive, exciting. Not a century-old company with a CEO whose favourite word is “efficiency”.

But efficiency built the modern world. And for those who want Britain to succeed, the real failure isn’t a lack of ambition, but a failure of attention.