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Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook

asia.nikkei.com

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Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook

#241

Post by biophysboy »

Sakos wrote: post #84
mgraczyk wrote: post #19

A lot of comments here are criticizing Apple for chasing cheap labor. Ignoring for a second the fact that this has a lot more to do with geopolitics and hedging geopolitical risk, I think it's important to think more carefully about the impact of companies investing in developing economies. By and large, the factory work done by people in developing economies is dramatically better in terms of quality of life and saf…

China was literally able to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty with all the manufacturing that was moved there. I think most people don't understand anything about economics. Vietnam absolutely wants and will benefit from an increasingly industrialized economy. edit: I'm seeing a number of comments pointing out how these are companies owned by Koreans. Which maybe isn't optimal, but the potential for…

Manufacturing for export with Western companies was central to China's rise - same goes for Korea, Japan, and Taiwan - but there was more to it than comparative advantage/labor arbitrage. There was a lot of heavy-handed government action: land reform dispossessing wealthy families, aggressive/protectionist state financing, etc.

Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook

#242

Post by caycep »

koheripbal wrote: post #38
mgraczyk wrote: post #19

A lot of comments here are criticizing Apple for chasing cheap labor. Ignoring for a second the fact that this has a lot more to do with geopolitics and hedging geopolitical risk, I think it's important to think more carefully about the impact of companies investing in developing economies. By and large, the factory work done by people in developing economies is dramatically better in terms of quality of life and saf…

There is a lot of dishonesty around Westerners complaining about foreign cheap labor. They claim to be championing labor rights, but they are often just angered at companies for stopping all manufacturing in the West. They see it as an obvious weakness in their ideology that companies can just walk away from their labor movement and go elsewhere. The obvious truth, and what literally all of these Vietnamese workers w…

A few thoughts:

-I knew someone who wanted to set up optical and circuit board manufacturing in Vietnam - the few factories they toured seemed to be set up very well. Also frequently with better female/male ratios in management levels (perhaps bc, at least what they were told, Vietnamese culture tends to be more matriarchal than elsewhere). Maybe why also a lot of Japanese electronic makers (Pentax, Nikon) had a bigger presence in Vietnam than expected

-the irony of Western manufacturing and standards of living - (coupled w/ strong policy and incentive support from the ccp) is that Xi Jinping seems to be actively going against perhaps one of the greatest economic partnership of recent times, namely USA/China. I think that is why there is likely going to be a contraction in the Chinese economy, if not already happen due to Zero Covid. If anything brings down the emperor/dynasty this time, it is because the grain ceases to flow (at least borrowing a phrase from an undergraduate Chinese history class...)

Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook

#243

Post by skohan »

cronix wrote: post #227
pedalpete wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is more likely that TSMC is diversifying away from building only in Taiwan. They have the expertise. Apple's expertise is engineering, design, and marketing. They don't own their own factories because that is not their expertise, and they probably don't want to bring that in house.

Designing their own chips in-house wasn't "their expertise" either, a few years ago. You won't expand into other areas unless you at least make it a priority and try.

Getting into semiconductors is probably substantially more complicated. Only a handful of companies are able to do it well and they have bene at it for decades.

Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook

#244

Post by zx8080 »

hintymad wrote: post #205
markdown wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...This is level of efficiency used to belong to the US. I doubt that.

Relatively speaking? In WWII, the US produced 300K planes, 130 carriers, 80 tanks every day on average, increased its steel output to 80M tons in 1944 alone, more than other countries combined. And hundreds of destroyers, corvettes, and submarines. Not that we need to do the same now, but it shows that how capable the US manufacturing industry can be.

Was that ability a result of the recent Great Depression and desperate needs of workers?

Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook

#245

Post by kccqzy »

astrange wrote: post #146
pishpash wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost certainly final assembly, and plugged into the supply chain next door.

The other parts aren't all made in China. The displays are made in Japan and Korea.

I don't think so. Some displays are (maybe used to?) made by a Chinese company called BOE in China. Specifically they are made in Sichuan Province, China.

Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook

#247

Post by dirtyid »

fiftyfifty wrote: post #216
bigcat12345678 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opression is necessary to development. Looking back for the cruelest opressions done by some nations towards American Indian, Asian, African in the early and haydays of industrial revolution. You are going to see opressions happening again and again in the future as well. It's just a natural process of society development.

I can't agree with this at all. We have plenty of modern examples that show this to not be the case: West Germany versus East Germany, South Korea versus North Korea, Taiwan versus China. In all these examples less oppressions results in a stronger economy and a higher standard of living for citizens.

West Germany was marshal planned by US at height of economic primacy and was previously developed which made recovery to prior levels possible. SK and TW were both bloody authoritarian govs sponsored by US (for coldwar containment) who had industrial policies, again supported by US at height of economic primacy.

As far as I'm aware, there are zero countries that has ever successfully developed without initial phase of authoritarianism / wide scale abuse - europeans had their colonies, US her slaves - it's basically a prerequisite. The second requirement being either on the good books and gaining the support of reigning hegemons or at least not be actively contained by them (East Germany).

Historically, developing countries simply require massive repression (and the occasional dose of cultural genocide) to establish stable national identities and enviroments where people behave like good cogs in the machine to build up the material conditions to enable less opression / more liberalization for later generations. Authoritarianism is the worst form of government for developement... except for all the others that have been tried.

Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook

#248

Post by rednerrus »

supernova87a wrote: post #24

I'm interested to know to what extent this is just assembly of parts imported from China, or whether the real control over things like the M1 chip assembly, secure element, logic board, etc. are also moved to Vietnam? Seems like that's the secret sauce / real proprietary stuff that tells you whether the high value is moving too. (or maybe that is not even in China either) And do they have the surrounding parts + engi…

China does surprisingly little when it comes to the advanced stuff.

Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook

#249

Post by megablast »

wbsss4412 wrote: post #82
surfpel wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a lot of dishonesty around Westerners complaining about foreign cheap labor. This is a strawman. You're conflating different groups of people with different interests. Some people complain about labor conditions, some people complain that jobs are leaving the country. Almost nobody is "dishonest" about this.

There are plenty of people who are extremely selective with regards to their outrage on each issue, though.

Everybody is. Unless there is someone outraged all the time.

Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook

#250

Post by nyokodo »

LtWorf wrote: post #81
koheripbal wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot of dishonesty around Westerners complaining about foreign cheap labor. They claim to be championing labor rights, but they are often just angered at companies for stopping all manufacturing in the West. They see it as an obvious weakness in their ideology that companies can just walk away from their labor movement and go elsewhere. The obvious truth, and what literally all of these Vietnamese workers w…

But now we can't build anything and if china embargoes us, we're doomed.

> But now we can't build anything and if china embargoes us, we're doomed.

Firstly there is vastly more manufacturing in the US, Canada, and Mexico than you appear to realize. Secondly China is far more prone to being embargoed than the United States. If China cut us off then the price of certain goods would increase significantly and there’d be shortages of some goods and industrial inputs but we could feed ourselves, keep the lights on, heat/cool our homes, keep our industry going, and crucially our military capacity would be untouched. China would lose its largest and demographically healthiest consumer market which would vastly deepen its economic hole, lose a huge supplier of food which China can’t do without, and the US navy could interdict all energy shipments to China which would result in the country deindustrializing in a few months after its reserves ran out. Depending on how the embargo was effected it might drag in Japan or India both whose navies could single-handedly cut off China from oil shipments.

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