Confidential Photo Shows Apple Spends $150 Million On Flying To China Every Year

According to LAFlyer’s tweet, Apple is spending an annual $150 million on flying back and forth between the US and China.

As in its post, a standee is put up at United Airlines with names of its top accounts and another one for Apple’s records only. A representative of United confirmed this information.

The photo was posted by LAFlyers

United said it showed its employees this information as in a limited pilot project focused on San Francisco to emphasize the importance of relationships with corporates. The airline said the project was discontinued and this image was not meant to go public.

In this project framework, United sorted out a small number of customers, directly contacted them with the aim to find out their concerns. The material containing these data was taken down. The airline also said it would review and limit the sharing of customers’ internal data to only those who involved. After all, the bottom of the standee said “confidential information”, we all know what that means.

50 business class each day

Every day, Apples takes 50 seats to fly from San Francisco to Shanghai and its products are mostly manufactured in China.

There is logical connection between Shanghai and “iPhone cities” Shenzhen as well as Zhengzhou where the production of these electronics hardware occurs.

Apple's manufacturer in China

Apple’s staff also often fly to Hong Kong and Taiwan, probably because the company needs to stay close to its supply chain. Engineers who previously worked at Apple said that their hardware-related jobs required frequent travel to China.

London is the nonmanufacturing destination that Apple visits the most often.

The sign posted on Twitter also shows other top clients for United Airlines. Accordingly, Facebook, Roche, and Google stood second with over $34 million spent every year.

Notably, Tim Cook, Apple CEO, does not occupy seats on United’s airplanes. Instead, he flies privately as following the board’s request. SEC recently reported that he spent $294,082 on private air travel as of 2018.

The photo has been removed from the post.