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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

#261

Post by nine_k »

echelon wrote: post #141
dylan604 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long before Vietnam pulls a move from China's playbook where they start to manufacture things based on the plans foreign companies brought them and sell the product under Vietnamese company brands?

That's just the algorithm. Every nation leveraging manufacturing for growth will do this. When it eventually gets too expensive for native workers, manufacturing moves again [1]. Except the locals now have a sizable middle class and knowledge economy, and there are high value industrial processes left behind: automotive, aerospace, scientific, etc. The whole world is growing up, and wealthy nations are paying for it…

It's interesting how e.g. Germany retains quite sizable manufacturing which is not going anywhere, and actually benefits from the local highly trained, highly paid workforce.

Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook

#262

Post by dirtyid »

nyokodo wrote: post #250
LtWorf wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ourselve…

>prone to being embargoed

Most US / global industries wouldn't be going anywhere without PRC supply chains / rare earth processing. Besides PRC is calorie self-sufficient and produces enough raw resources domestically for war economy, and export to west is like... 5% of GDP total, i.e. trivial in total war scenario. Now go look up how much steel, oil and other primary inputs PRC generates domestically... it wouldn't remotely deindustrialize meanwhile PRC military capacity wouldn't just be untouched, it would be allocated the redirected industrial resources to sustain aquisitions multiple times current size.

It's 2022, India and Japan do not remotely have capability to blockade PLAN. Refer to the detailed studies coming out of US wonks recently are questioning the feasibility of whether US can effectively enforce a blockade at all, which btw is an act of war, and in age of networked mutual vunerabilities PRC has options to make US/containment partners to hurt comparably. The amount of oil US produces is not measured in millions of barrels but 130 vunerable refineries and other critical infra that PRC can target in retaliation. Absolutely expect US industrial outputs to come to a crawl, John Deere tractors bricked in the fields, and homes freezing because half the energy grid is compromised in event of PRC blockade. Or that we maybe in or near the timeline where PRC will gain conventional global strike capabilities that places US CONUS at conventional risk.

Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook

#263

Post by karpierz »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #171
koheripbal wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's exactly the opposite. People who can afford a good education are harder to control.

No it isn't. People with nothing to lose and living in poverty while seeing their democratic neighbors prospering are harder to control. People with education, jobs, and families - something to lose - are easier to control. How many Tienanmen Squares has China had since Asian and Western democracies opened their markets and enriched China.

Fun fact: due to the small labor market for terrorists and education spurring political interests, terrorists are disproportionally well-educated men from upper class families. Essentially, they're very intense lobbyists.

Citation: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691177823/wh...

Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook

#264

Post by nine_k »

koheripbal wrote: post #186
fiftyfifty wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think many of us would be more supportive of outsourcing manufacturing to developing countries if their government aligned more with Western ideals. The fact is many countries, like Vietnam, are still "developing" because they have authoritarian governments that have been oppressing their population to some extent keeping their labor cheap while stunting their economic potential. We see the problems with this situa…

It would be helpful to characterize them as "democratic" ideals - not "western" ideals. There is nothing intrinsically "western" about human rights. In fact, calling them "western" ideas is exactly how autocracies belittle them to their people.

> There is nothing intrinsically "western" about human rights.

It would be interesting if you could give an example of similar ideas from seriously non-Western cultures. Say, Asia has plenty of cultures, a number of them with highly developed, original schools of philosophy.

Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook

#265

Post by nyokodo »

WitCanStain wrote: post #258
nyokodo wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ourselve…

This is assuming that China's rapidly evolving navy cannot do anything about these blockades. They have massive shipbuilding capacity and currently the most advanced destroyer (type 055) in the world.

> They have massive shipbuilding capacity and currently the most advanced destroyer

The vast majority of their navy and ship building capacity is coastal. Their blue water navy is still minuscule and the challenge isn’t just manufacturing but experienced personnel which is decidedly harder to quickly scale up and is not aided by their terminal demographics.

Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook

#266

Post by alephnerd »

senttoschool wrote: post #252
alephnerd wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. By most standards the PRC is stuck in the middle income trap. To paraphrase an earlier comment I wrote sometime back: Chinese household median income is around $4,700-4,800 in 2021, with massive disparities between First world comparable regions such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin, and rust belt regions like Wuhan [0]. Even the Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has noted that 600 million Chinese earn less that $140…

>middle income trap China is not a good example for the middle income trap. Middle income trap countries relied on cheap labors but could not move up in the value chain. China has moved up the value chain. They're the top or close to the top for many things including mobile phones, chip manufacturing (7nm), AI, software, 5G, electric car batteries, nuclear power, fusion research, quantum computers, etc. They also pub…

Yet, median income [0] and HDI [1] both at the macro level and at the prefecture level are comparable to Brazil [2][3] and lag behind both Russia [4][5] and Mexico [6][7].

There is no denying the amount of growth the service sector in China has seen, yet a lot of this growth and development is among a sliver of the population living in better developed regions such as the various coastal prefectures. Beijing, Tianjin, Guangzhou, Shanghai, etc can be treated as developed, but what about the hinterlands such as Sichuan, Ningxia, Hunan, Guangxi, etc? This middle income trap is not a good thing by the way - I take no joy pointing this harsh truth out because this means hundreds of millions of PRC nationals are stuck in less than ideal economic positions.

Also, if we are talking about the value chain, Brazil is very high in the ONG (Petrobras, Odenbrecht), Aeronautics (Embraer), Automotive, and Defense (Odenbrecht, Embraer) value chain thanks to economic policies in the 90s and 2000s that are comparable to those the PRC has started adopting in the past 10-15 years.

[0] http://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202201/t2022011...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_administrative_divisio...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Brazilian_federative_u...

[3] https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/en/economia/noticia/2017-02...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_subjects_of_Ru...

[5] https://tass.com/economy/1301957

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mexican_states_by_Huma...

[7] https://www.efe.com/efe/english/life/mexican-households-have...

Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook

#268

Post by gleenn »

cyberpunk wrote: post #44
gleenn wrote: post #27

How is no one mentioning that China is threatening Taiwan. If the US ends up in a war with China, suddenly most Apple products would have serious operations problems if not being shut off completely. Cheap labor isn't a bad reason, but this is also a hedge against the heating politics between the West and both Russia and China.

If the US goes to war with China, I can imagine Apples supply chain problems won’t be very high on our priority lists…

No, but it will be priority #1 for Apple, which is why they're opening other plants and not whoever you thin "us" is.

Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook

#269

Post by nine_k »

zx8080 wrote: post #244
hintymad wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

More like colossal wartime spending.

A fighting army (and navy, and airforce) is one hell of a market; they almost always would like more than you can manufacture.

Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook

#270

Post by happyopossum »

kccqzy wrote: post #245
astrange wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

BOE got caught trying to slip sub-spec panels into the pipeline and got spanked for it.
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