Anyone know the difference in 10 years of lease payments, vs purchase outright?
Rule of thumb is monthly lease rates amount to ~1% of the airframe purchase price, over a 10 year lease the leasing company will have recovered their initial investment, a second term lease or sale at residual value is just an added bonus. Of course actual deals will hover around both sides of this number, depending on which side is in a beter negotiating position.
So why would Singapore replace 5 leased airplanes with 5 owned airplanes if in 10 years they won't be able to sell them.
Same reason. If they can obtain cheaper financing than a leasing company (and to my knowledge SQ is sitting on a fairly large amount of free cash), then over a 10 year period they can write off the asset value to zero with a smaller overall cost than if the same aircraft were leased. All beancounting stuff.