Posted on 09/05/2020 7:22:34 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
I think Apple’s gets labor for free because they help the Chinese government track down government critics,
They aren’t the only place making smartphones. India and other countries in the region are used. With nearly 2.5 billion cellphones in the Chinese, Indian and Indonesian markets that’s where you need to build them.
Well, the article says that Tim Cook argues that the reason why Apple builds in China is because she has an educated mass of people who have the sophisticated tooling and assembly skills to make Smart Phones.
My question is, why not diversify supply chains to India or Indonesia ( two countries you mentioned)?
Is it because they don’t have the large number of skilled people that China has, or are there other factors involved?
We are our own worst enemy due to our own governments.
Several years ago I was at a party where I had a long discussion with an entrepreneur who had pioneered a new concept product. He had shepherded it to market and had in his first year sold a lot of this electronic product made in California. He had a work force of over 300 workers in his California factory making it.
He was designing version 2.0 of his product which required re-tooling his factory when knock-offs of his version 1.0 product started appearing on the market made in China. Even though his product was patented, he could not stop them from coming in due to the costs of challenging them would exceed his entire profits from his first year.
Between the County, State of California, US regulations, CalOHSA, and other agencies, the delay in re-tooling his factory just to get approvals to make his version 2.0 product would take OVER A YEAR to change over. Ridiculous requirements.
His product also required FCC approvals where apparently his design and plans were LEAKED to China before he could get his own into production due to the delays! Again, it was patented. The Chinese knock-offs of 2.0 were on the market in TWO MONTHS. . . And he was still an estimated nine months from opening his new V. 2.0 assembly line in California! Sales of version 1.0 tanked. He was facing imminent bankruptcy...
His only solution to remain in business? He tracked down the Chinese assembler of the pirated knock off, and contracted with them to make his genuine product, which they were able to start making in just two weeks. No regulations to meet, no government hoops to jump through, no required forms to fill out, just provide the design and circuit spec sheets and they met the exact specifications to the letter, using his exact parts and met his requirements at 1/2 the cost, completely packaged and ready to sell.
He was very apologetic but he wound up laying off three-quarters of his California workers, transferred the other quarter to sales, warehousing and shipping, canceled his applications with the state and federal regulatory agencies, and closed his factory. He had no choice. There was no way he could compete with all the regulations blocking him from getting moving. He was very bitter about it.
He was exploring moving his business to Texas once he got enough capital.
No. Smart phones are made in Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Japan, and now India. Many are hand assembled in small shops in the Chinese and Hong Kong entrepreneurial supermarkets where there are hundreds if not thousands of small businesses churning our inexpensive white-box phones. In fact the iPhone 11 Pro is now being assembled in India. iPhone SE has been assembled in Brazil.
So much for this China iPhone monolith slave labor myth. It hasn’t existed for years, if it ever did. The workers on the Apple assembly lines are individually hired and work for a Taiwanese assembly company, not Apple, and certainly not a Chinese slave labor organization.
That may not be the case for a Chinese sweat shop turning out T-shirts or Nike shoes, but it is for Apple’s assembly lines, because they are monitored by Apple employees.
China has actually become less and less “cost effective” as more and more of the workers have moved into the new middle class.
China has Extraordinary Skills = In Bribery
Never owned an Apple product and never will
It sounds like Tim Cook is mighty proud of the “Football Fields” worth of tooling engineers that he and Steve Jobs helped to create, while bleeding the United States dry.
Patriotism is not mandatory, but when you feed a beast like Communist China, you’re delusional if you can’t calculate the costs.
Yes, we have entitled brats for a work force. That’s by design. Where do we think they got so complacent? Universities are stocked with Marxist professors for a reason.
The question is, can it be turned around?
As I have mention in several posts above, Apple has done so to several countries, and is doing more. However, many of the sub-assembly makers are also in China, so that is a consideration for many manufacturers and assemblers, especially when you take into account the “just-in-time” delivery of parts and sub-assemblies that is necessary in modern manufacturing and assembly to minimize multiple handling of such parts to minimize costs.
One of the problems to doing that is local regulations with plant ownership. For example, in India, they have a law that require Indian ownership of manufacturing, AND products that were sold in India had to be at least 50% made by India citizen owned businesses which precluded iPhones from even being sold in India, much less made there. Multinational corporations are not welcomed in India. Nor are franchises of international companies. Such rules limited what phones could even be sold in India. Consumers could find Indian manufactured Android phones, but not many internationally made Android phones, unless they were smuggled in. Getting Apple in took years of negotiating and involved getting the US government involved with diplomacy to resolve before Apple was even allowed to sell officially iPhones there. There were a lot of smuggled iPhones in India, though.
Apple doesn’t get its labor free. It’s not under contract with the Chinese government. Apple has a contract is with two Taiwanese companies, Foxconn and Pegatron. Where do you guys get your information that is so wrong??? Do you just make it up? Taiwan is NOT part of the Chinese mainland and is, in fact, a separate country that just happens to have some factories and assembly plants on mainland China. Foxconn Technology Group is a subsidiary of HonHai Precision Industry Company, Ltd., headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan. It is a multinational corporation with plants around the world. It trades on several stock exchanges as FoxConn. It is not owned by the Chinese Communist Party.
Pegatron Corporation is also a Taiwanese business with plants in China and elsewhere in the world. Pegatron primarily assembles CE for numerous brands, producing notebooks, netbook computers, desktop computers, game consoles, handheld devices, motherboards, video cards, LCD TVs, as well as broadband communication products such as smartphones, set-top boxes and cable modems. For Apple Pegatron produces iPads. It is ALSO not owned by the CCP.
For the most part, Apple works with and supports the FREE CHINESE... who PAY their almost 2 million employees.
Sorry. Not an apple fan by any stretch but I gave up using my HP computer and now strictly rely on my iPhone for 99% of all internet usage. They are the best in my opinion.
Extremely easy to use.
Ps. My current phone is many years old now. When it goes I won’t buy a China made phone.
I use a Walmart flip-phone from TracPhone - $9.99 and I hardly use it; basically for checking in - I’m not a yakker.
I sometimes don’t know how to use my iPhone as a phone. I use it as my everyday computer. I’ve dropped calls. It rarely rings.
That’s Apple’s call. Other companies make then all over Asia.
and everyone of those apps has some form of spying capability that sends data to the Chinese government.
At the cheap wages they pay the Chinese.
very good assessment of the currant situation. China has been kicking our asses; not because they are so much brighter or work so much harder, but because we have been hobbling our tech industries and dumbing down our education system for the past fifty years. We hog-tie our manufacturing while China’s been pushing and driving theirs.
Then another hundred times as an American who can't work in his field because men like Cook love 'motivated' labor forces... Then last as an American after World War III when apple gizmo code assisted with destroying his country.
RE: At the cheap wages they pay the Chinese.
See Post #57 above. The wages Apple pays workers are ABOVE China’s average.
RE: I use a Walmart flip-phone from TracPhone
I bet it’s also made in China. Walmart is notorious for selling products made in China.
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