There great new business book, Apple in China, is currently number one on the business bestseller chart. Check out John Stewart’s interview with the author, Patric McGee.
As noted in my review of two-weeks ago, the fast-paced book traces how Apple’s first foray into Asia, started with Taiwan and expanded into massive facilities in China. Apple has now spent more money than the Marshal Plan teaching, training and investing into hundreds of Chinese companies to develop the skills needed to product the vast quantities of iPhones and other products. Currently they are spending $55 billion per year.
Apple is now dependent on these suppliers and facilities and cannot move production elsewhere. Ironically, in making this investment for their own products, Apple has simultaneously created the infrastructure for electronics manufacturing in China that is now competing with Apple’s own products.
The book raises pressing questions about what happens when the world’s most valuable company is intertwined with a rising superpower amid growing U.S.-China tensions.
The author notes that the first move to Asia occurred in 1994 when I was the one who brought the Newton to Taiwan to speed up its development and utilize the country’s manufacturing resources. I had recently joined Apple, and for many years prior utilized Asian manufacturing at Polaroid and other companies, not primarily because of lower labor cost, but because of the faster time to market. I just duplicated at Apple what I had done at these other companies over the years. While many companies were already utilizing Asian partners in Japan, Taiwan and China, Apple was still building their products in the U.S. and were oblivious to the opportunities.
I won’t take the blame for what Apple has done since then, but I’ll take the credit for doing what was needed at the time to get the product to market in record time and doing what most consumer tech companies have been doing for nearly forty years since.