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Apple to move 40-45% iPhone production to India

wsj.com

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Re: Apple to move 40-45% iPhone production to India

#71

Post by throwawaaay129 »

philliphaydon wrote: post #68
DocTomoe wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who can honestly say they did not ever flaunt worktime laws (where they exist)? IT people do 60-80 hours, in the liberal-democratic country where there is a strict limit of 48 hours/week (and the average being around 39h). People wear that as a misplaced badge of honour - and often complain behind closed doors. Sounds similar.

I've been living in Asia for 11 or 12 years now. There is definitely a strange culture of over-working. Young people who live at home with their parents sometimes work late because they don't want to go home to their parents. Alot of other people work late because they want to get noticed for promotions etc. Some of it's self-inflicted. The first company I worked for in Singapore, the 'suits' as they are called (glor…

Yeah, I think it's a scenario where you can probably sue and you can probably win - but then (just like in the US) you're known as the person that sues their employer and it's a black mark.

I haven't heard of people getting lawsuits about 996 thrown out in China - but to be fair I also haven't heard of people suing over that either.

Re: Apple to move 40-45% iPhone production to India

#72

Post by luckylion »

mschuster91 wrote: post #57
sgu999 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple and many westerners never understand the risk and the ethics implication of doing business in China. Apple industrial partners are all asians. Samsung and the like don't do any better regarding ethics. Not sure why the divide with the "ignorant west" is necessary in your argument. Of course people at Apple understand the risk, and it is taken into account to generate as much profit as possible.

> Apple industrial partners are all asians. Samsung and the like don't do any better regarding ethics. You can rightfully complain about labor practices in other Asian countries, but forced labor from concentration camps is a uniquely Chinese atrocity.

And one that's usually not done by Apple or Samsung, but by contract-manufacturers like Foxconn. Both Apple and Samsung use Foxconn. The "iphone factories" aren't Apple-factories, they're Foxconn factories which currently produce iphones but will produce Samsung galaxy phones if iphone production moves.

It's a "companies use Chinese as-close-to-slave-labor-as-you-can-get-without-being-called-out-labor" thing, not a "naive Western company finds out how things work in China" thing.

Re: Apple to move 40-45% iPhone production to India

#73

Post by ngcc_hk »

throwawaaay129 wrote: post #50
fyresala wrote: post #26

iPhone made in China is no better than the cotton from Xinjiang. Earlier the reports are workers in the China iPhone factory had a protest and brutal conflict with the local police. Reasons varied from unbearable working condition, the zero-covid policy, and being deceived about the compensation. After the local police oppressed the campaign, the government assigned headcounts to local villages, demanding them to fil…

I don't know where people get the idea people are semi-enslaved in factories.. Having lived in China, in my second hand experience Chinese worker protection laws are quite strict. Somewhere between US and Europe. It's not really easy to fire people and people regularly sue their employers and win. The legal system is generally very heavily biased towards the little guy I just feel really bad for these people. They pr…

It is not the law or the occasional protection. It is when it is not working, the threat as experienced by local that is the issue. Not to mention the overall issue of human suppression. It is not helping by producing and buying china.

Anyway, I think they moved is not because of this though. More because the unstable situation. And the invasion of Taiwan is inevitable. I will do it if I am in power. Not because I want to but I have to. That is the problem.

And if that happened, what you do. Like German or EU on Russia oil.

How many lesson you have to learn before you call yourselves …

Re: Apple to move 40-45% iPhone production to India

#75

Post by pera »

throwawaaay129 wrote: post #50
fyresala wrote: post #26

iPhone made in China is no better than the cotton from Xinjiang. Earlier the reports are workers in the China iPhone factory had a protest and brutal conflict with the local police. Reasons varied from unbearable working condition, the zero-covid policy, and being deceived about the compensation. After the local police oppressed the campaign, the government assigned headcounts to local villages, demanding them to fil…

I don't know where people get the idea people are semi-enslaved in factories.. Having lived in China, in my second hand experience Chinese worker protection laws are quite strict. Somewhere between US and Europe. It's not really easy to fire people and people regularly sue their employers and win. The legal system is generally very heavily biased towards the little guy I just feel really bad for these people. They pr…

Your experience seems very different from what several international human rights organisations have been reporting for the past two decades.

I'd like to invite everyone here to follow for instance CLW: https://chinalaborwatch.org/

Re: Apple to move 40-45% iPhone production to India

#76

Post by sofixa »

anovikov wrote: post #58
fyresala wrote: post #26

iPhone made in China is no better than the cotton from Xinjiang. Earlier the reports are workers in the China iPhone factory had a protest and brutal conflict with the local police. Reasons varied from unbearable working condition, the zero-covid policy, and being deceived about the compensation. After the local police oppressed the campaign, the government assigned headcounts to local villages, demanding them to fil…

Truth is, there is no way to profitably produce any durable consumer products without dealing with someone who treats workers like trash, simply because everyone else is also doing this. Of course, we have a choice of them being Commies (China), or not being Commies (India), but that's about it. Only way to fundamentally fix it will be to introduce a new Iron Curtain where we will "not trade with anyone we don't cont…

> Truth is, there is no way to profitably produce any durable consumer products without dealing with someone who treats workers like trash, simply because everyone else is also doing this

In some cases that's true, but in the case of Apple - the one with higher cost "luxury" products, double digit percent profit margins, tens of billions of cash and trillion dollar market cap - it doesn't really make sense as an excuse.

Re: Apple to move 40-45% iPhone production to India

#77

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #74

What I would rather know is where the entire supply chain is. What countries contribute what percentage of the finished product? You can claim "made in X" if the final assembly is there, even if 90% of the value add is in the supply chain not located in X.

Apple have the budget and the interest to investigate their supply chain and provide a good answer to this. Outside sources probably don't :/

My uninformed speculation would be that the answer is something like 90% China for each hop along the chain, but those accumulate. 0.9^n becomes small with large enough n, so depending on the viewpoint it might be majority non-China…

Re: Apple to move 40-45% iPhone production to India

#78

Post by radicalbyte »

cpursley wrote: post #49
fyresala wrote: post #26

iPhone made in China is no better than the cotton from Xinjiang. Earlier the reports are workers in the China iPhone factory had a protest and brutal conflict with the local police. Reasons varied from unbearable working condition, the zero-covid policy, and being deceived about the compensation. After the local police oppressed the campaign, the government assigned headcounts to local villages, demanding them to fil…

I basically agree with you on all points. But can we please drop this "civilized world" term? I suggest "democratic world".

Yeah considering that China for about 2000 years was the leading civilisation I'm not sure why people use that term.

Re: Apple to move 40-45% iPhone production to India

#79

Post by Qtips87 »

If Apple want to exit China for geopolitical reason it should move to Vietnam. Western manufacturers have set up shops in India before and there were few successful stories and many have exit eventually. Ford for example exit India after not turning a profit for decades. When people point out India's problem it is the usual suspect like government red tapes, poor infrastructure, unreliable electric grid...etc. Some even blame India's problem on democracy, which is absurd. Germany is a democracy and is a manufacturing powerhouse. But the fundamental problem underlying all these is the average IQ of a nation. India's population average IQ is 82 and this is the fundamental reason why the workers productivity is so low. This is the elephant in the room that every manufacturer who want to set up shop in a foreign country should consider.

Re: Apple to move 40-45% iPhone production to India

#80

Post by papito »

What was unthinkable in 2020 is now thinkable in 2022. Can Russia just start a major land war in Europe, wiping out whole cities? Sounds crazy. Nnnope.

"Chinese President Xi Jinping has ordered the country’s military to develop the ability to take control of Taiwan by 2027, according to CIA official David Cohen."

https://www.thedefensepost.com/2022/09/21/china-seize-taiwan...

Tim Cook is not an idiot. He knows that this would be a major event that would put his entire company in existential danger, and once the odds are above 1%, you are playing for keeps.

Remarkably, this is just one of the factors. Xi's behavior in general has become increasingly unpredictable, but also Apple is not immune to the "Hollywood strategy" - China learns what it needs to learn, borrows all the advanced technology, and tells the other side to please abscond when the time is right.

This has already happened for the US movie industry. Disney, after humiliating itself in front of the CCP for over a decade in order to make a buck, is now not welcome. China makes its own movies thank you very much.

The time for phones and Teslas is coming. Tim Cook knows this. Elon Musk - not so much. That guy is oblivious, busy being a one-man moderator switchboard on Twitter and chasing down Hunter Biden conspiracies, or something.

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