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Grupo Aeroportuario del Centro Norte, S.A.B. de C.V.
OMA runs a group of airports in central and northern Mexico and earns money from the airlines, shops, and passengers who use them.
OMA is an airport company. It operates more than ten airports across central and northern Mexico, including the one in Monterrey, one of the country's biggest industrial cities. If you fly into a mid-sized Mexican city for business or a beach vacation, there's a decent chance you land at an airport OMA runs. It also owns a few hotels and an industrial park next to one of its airports, but airports are the main event.
Here's how the money works. Airlines pay OMA fees every time a plane lands and takes off, and every passenger who walks through the terminal pays a departure tax bundled into the ticket price. OMA also rents space to shops, restaurants, car rental desks, and advertisers. So the company earns more when more people fly and when they spend more inside the terminal. It's a bit like being the landlord of a shopping mall that happens to have runways attached — you collect from the tenants and from everyone who walks in the door. The business is regulated. Mexican law caps how much OMA can charge for its core airport services, and the rates are reset in multi-year cycles negotiated with the government. That caps the upside, but it also makes the business predictable. Running an airport is expensive to build but cheap to expand once the runway and terminal exist, so extra passengers flow through to profit quite nicely. When travel demand is strong, OMA throws off a lot of cash.
That cash goes toward expanding terminals and runways to keep up with traffic, paying dividends to shareholders, and occasionally reducing debt. The big risks are things nobody controls: a recession, a pandemic that stops people flying, or an airline cutting routes. Mexico's aviation market has also been shaken up in recent years as budgets shift between carriers, which changes traffic patterns at individual airports. But as long as people keep flying to Monterrey and Mexico's other regional cities, OMA keeps collecting its fees.
Saved answer · last researched 12 Nov 2026