While this article is about credit cards and miles, the moment I realized they were banks was when I learned that most airline's fleets are leased. Since maintenance and planes are so expensive, lots of airlines lease a fleet with support contracts from places like GE Capital. From an MBA perspective, it makes sense, but it is such a weird concept to me that you don't own such a pivotal part of your business.
This... makes sense? Airlines provide air transport services, and the actual "hardware" is pivotal but not integral to their core business. Airlines are much more than just "flying planes" — there's route planning, crew management, fuel pricing and forecasting, regulatory and legal compliance, operational logistics, landing/takeoff slot allotment, customer service, marketing, etc. that the airline is responsible for.
Think of Netflix using AWS. Digital content delivery is obviously crucial to their business (DVD deliveries aside) but it's not vital that they own their own servers — they're first and foremost a video streaming service, not a CDN datacenter business.
There are also various types of leases [1], commonly "wet" or "dry", which are analogous to managed/unmanaged/raw metal cloud services.
It makes perfect sense if you realize that the airline execs are maximizing their bonuses for the next quarter or four, and not optimizing for the health of the company for the next 10 years. Being stuck with a company and losing a job if the company goes bankrupt is for losers like us, not for those who will leap off with the golden parachute and land another cushy job somewhere with their "years of experience driving growth and providing value to the shareholder".
Executives build the company that the investors want them to build.
By far, the biggest costs of running an airline are the planes and the fuel. But the investors don't want to bet on the value of physical planes, nor do they want to bet on the price of oil. If they wanted to place those bets, they'd just invest in Boeing or Exxon. Instead, they usually want to bet that one airline will perform better than her competitors over the next year or so.
So, airline executives lease their fleets and buy tons of oil futures. This gives them a better shot of hitting their targets even if the price of oil skyrockets, it makes their fleet easier to scale up or down according to demand, and it makes their stock more attractive to investors who want more predictable performance.
> Executives build the company that the investors want them to build.
Assuming they're mindless drones of the faceless "investors" with no free will or intent of their own.
> But the investors don't want to bet on the value of physical planes, nor do they want to bet on the price of oil. If they wanted to place those bets, they'd just invest in Boeing or Exxon.
You're putting the cart before the horse since that's a choice by the exec. If they wanted to derisk themselves they could as well hedge by buying puts on Boeing or calls on Exxon.
Overall, who decides what a good business is? Unfortunately, that's come down to a gang of Wall Street suits who would much rather punish good businesses for not catering to their attention span deficient trading/gambling habits. We would much rather have some jack of all trades making business decisions based on their next year's bonus/chalet/yacht rather than people who depend on those businesses (customers and employees), so of course we get to this state.
Something that is non-obvious in this space is that some of this can be down to tax treatments and asset depreciation.
In a nutshell, when you buy an asset you can depreciate the value of the asset over the working life of the asset and in many tax jurisdictions (my knowledge/experience comes from the UK and US asset financing industry) offset that depreciated amount against profits, in the year the asset depreciates.
This means that you can essentially offset capital expenditure against tax, which is good business.
But if you don't make enough profit through the use of the asset at the right time, you end up losing the benefit.
But there exist large companies that make lots of profit, such that they can always offset the depreciation. And so _they_ can buy the asset, use the depreciation against their profits and then lease the asset to you. They might even be able to do this at a rate that ends up _being cheaper than you actually owning the asset_, depending on circumstances.
Most tech companies lease their hardware too. OpEx is always better than Capex.
I mean AWS is the obvious example, that's basically leasing your hardware. But even companies with on-prem data centers lease most of that gear. It's way better for cash flow to make monthly payments than an up front one.
What I'm not understanding is how it's more profitable to involve a 3rd party company, who will be taking their costs and adding a profit margin, rather than doing it all in-house?
If it costs on average $X/month to maintain a plane, then the maintenance company is going to charge you $(X+Y)/month, where Y is a decent profit margin. Certainly you'd save money by not involving the third party, right?
Or are these companies happy to pay it because that $Y also covers risk of a sudden expensive repair?
From that perspective every large company is a bank. This is part of the reason everyone wants a subscription business. Not only do shareholders love recurring revenue, but so do lenders. In essence every business is a investment bank that has a few investment available that are closed to everyone else (the core business).
