During our current interesting times in geopolitics, everyone is exposed to fascinating phenomena about which we never knew. This article appeared today, explaining:
For a quarter-century, the tech giant [Apple] has made massive investments in equipment and sent thousands of its top engineers to hundreds of factories across the country, training China's workers how to meet near-impossible engineering standards and then scale production to enormous volumes.
Apple's Chinese suppliers employ 3 million people.
Each iPhone is made from 1,000 components. For Apple to ship one million units a day requires hundreds of factories in China to build one billion parts per day.
Pegatron employed 100,000 laborers; at times the company was losing 25,000 workers a month, according to a former China-based Apple executive. This meant that "they needed to hire 25,000 just to stay in a steady state," he related. A contemporaneous "attrition memo" from Apple corroborated this, saying: "Worker exit rates at Pegatron Shanghai averaged 6 percent per week, and average tenure was only 68 days." (It's not hard to grasp why: These jobs are often 12 hours a day, 6 days a week of tremendously monotonous work.)
And, of course, the Huawei iPhone clones are exceeding the iPhone capabilities at a fraction of the price.
If you are intrigued, go read the whole thing. It's short.
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