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Depreciation at Delta and Singapore Airlines

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Depreciation at Delta Air Lines and Singapore Airlines

Acct 531 – Intermediate Finance Acct 1 SECTION 1 – 13WQ
Instructor: John V. Merle, MBA

February 27, 2013

Emma Waage

Roarke Stone

Tim Gould
Introduction

Depreciation expense is the way that the use of an asset is matched with the revenue that is generated from the asset on the income statement during the time period being reported. Each asset used in a business has a useful life as disclosed by the company’s depreciation policies for each category of asset. The other piece of calculating depreciation is the assumed salvage or “residual” value. There are several different methods of depreciating an asset:

1) Straight-line = [pic] 2) Double-declining …show more content…

What does it gain or lose by doing so? How does this relate to the company’s overall strategy?

Singapore maintains one of the youngest average fleet ages in the industry at 5.1 years old. They were depreciating their aircraft over 8 years with a salvage value of 10% up until 1989 and then increased it to 10 years and 20% salvage value. The average depreciation rate per $100 for Singapore Airlines was $11.25 prior to this change and $8.00 after, compared with Delta’s $6.00. The company is majority-owned by the Singapore government, but did not receive any subsidy from the government. Its stock is, however, followed by over 20 investment analysts worldwide. In 1993, their net profit dropped from $922 to $741 million in Singapore dollars as depreciation expense as a percent of total operating expenses had grown from 14.8% to 15.8% in one year. Staff bonuses were cut from 3.4 months of pay to .5 months of pay in one year. The other issue that that was hurting their profitability was that their strategy was not in line with their utilization rate of only 71.3%, down from 78.9% in 1989. They should have been focusing on the amount of depreciation they were paying expensing as a percent of operating expense much sooner. With profits and utilization rates declining constantly over the last five years, a focus on the depreciation methods could have helped them reduce the decline in net profits. With an aggressive capital expansion program

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