Buying Jackson Square Aviation and entering aircraft leasing in earnest (2012)

Time with a price tag on it

What Mitsubishi UFJ Lease acquired here was less the roughly seventy aircraft than the bundle of people and relationships that reads residual values, negotiates with airlines around the world, and decides when to sell. Growing that capability from nothing in Japan would have taken ten years. The $1.3B (¥100bn) price tag was placed on that time. The shape of the deal says the same thing — a young platform in its third year, taken over by the party with the capital just after it cleared its start-up losses.

What the price tag did not include was how the purchased time would be used. Within ten years aviation had become the company’s biggest earner, and through those same ten years each successive president spoke of the need to grow something other than aircraft. The difficulty a company has in finding its next field after succeeding in one is written into the earnings briefings and the changes of president. An aviation business that by 2025 was ordering fifty aircraft from Airbus on its own account is less an answer to that difficulty than an enlargement of the problem that still has to be solved.