A New Apple Indicator: Steve's Airplane Bills??

Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on February 26

Morgan Stanley’s Kathryn Huberty has a theory about Apple stock. It’s a buy. But wait until you see one of her reasons: Steve Jobs is flying around in his private Gulfstream V jet (tail number N2N) on Apple business a little more than usual. She reports in a research note noticed by Barron’s today that Apple reimbursed Jobs $550,000 for expenses related to the jet during the most recent quarter. That’s a lot for a single quarter. Apple’s 10K for the 2007 fiscal year reports that during that year, Apple reimbursed jobs for $776,000 in plane expenses. In 2006 it was $202,000. In 2005 it was $1.1 million, or about $275,000 per quarter. That suggest that Jobs is spending more time in the air on company time than is typical. To Huberty that indicates that he’s doing deals, suggesting that more big announcements are coming.

Either that or he’s flying to more distant destinations. What she misses is that during the first fiscal quarter of 2008, Jobs flew himself (and presumably several members of his team) to Europe to unveil the iPhone in the UK, France and Germany, and probably also stopped in other countries for meetings with wireless execs in countries to be named later. And there may or may not have been an iPhone-related trip to China in there somewhere. It’s certainly an interesting statistic, but not one that I would have picked as an indicator of the future performance of the stock. Meanwhile, she also thinks Apples’ gross margins for the March quarter will be up a little to 35.8%. She also thinks Apple is going to miss its 10 million-unit commitment on iPhone sales, but thinks Mac sales will break the 10 million mark.

For more about the jet: Here’s is registration information with the Federal Aviation Administration. And TUAW scored some spy pictures said to be of the jet itself in 2005. I grabbed the photo above, which shows Steve’s jet on approach at Le Bourget in Paris from Paul Marais-Hayer’s public Picasa stream here. Note the little “N2N” number on the engine.

Update:Commenter al Cecchi below notes that there may also have been a spike in jet fuel prices during the fourth calendar quarter, or Apple’s fiscal Q1. If that’s right (it sounds right, given the price of gasoline these days) then, between the trips to Europe, and more expensive fuel, I bet you can explain a lot of that higher-than-usual airplane expense.

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