Apple Goes On A Hiring Spree In China

[Flatulo]

38. The President personally asked Apple to bring some iPhone jobs back here, and

the response from Steve Jobs was something like 'those jobs are never coming back here'.

Apple insiders claim that the US no longer has the manufacturing infrastructure or trained workers to make their products. They believe that their Asian factories have far outpaced our own capabilities. Entire cities spring up in China just to hold the factories to make the components that go into western gadgets.

Given that Apple makes about $400,000 profit per employee per year, wages are just a small part of their reasoning.

When I worked for Seagate, we were making 25,000,000 disk drives per quarter in the Far East.
That's a staggering number, but comparable to the scale of Apple's volumes. Every single atom in those drives was sourced in the Far East. To bring that work back here would have involved massive reconfiguration of the supply chain. There would have to be cities built to house the factories to make all those components. I remember seeing pictures of the factory that manufactured our actuator bodies. This is the structure that holds the recording heads, and it needs to be machined in a lathe. This factory had about 6,000 lathes manned by 6,000 operators. These were all new, state-of-the-art machines to hold the extremely tight tolerances required in hard drives. I've never seen an American factory that could even begin to approach that scale of production, (maybe we could have done that during WWII?) and I would guess that Apple is in the same position. If they're making 60,000,000 iPads per year, they've got thousands of injection moulding machines going 24/7 to keep that beast fed. Thousands.

I don't know what the projected volumes are for the new Google/Motorola phone, but I bet they're a very small fraction of the iPhone volumes. Remember, Android phones have slightly more than half the market share for smartphones, but that is being split among dozens or more makes and models. So I would expect that Google's task is much more manageable. I certainly wish them luck and a profitable venture, even if its a PR gimmick.

I could see the US being used for small volume, custom-made 'boutique' products, but I don't ever expect to see the extremely large-scale manufacturing that the Chinese have built.

Definitely a good question, tho'.

On edit: of course, the factories of all the Far East component suppliers that feed Apple's factories are low-wage operations. So there is a wage component that gets compounded in again and again as a widget makes its way thru the supply chain. Still, it is absolutely sickening the profit that that fucking company makes. $400,000 per employee. Most companies are happy to make 5% margin. Apple makes 1000%.