>Chinese companies’ share of iPhone electronics production will rise from 7% this year to 24% by 2025,<p>I have been repeating this for years [1] [2] but every time gets downvoted into oblivion on HN. Not only that, there are no signs of Apple turning ship either. Those that were forced out by Geopolitics doesn't count.<p>But yes, doing <i>assembly</i> in India gets their PR win.<p>At least, judging from the 141 comments so far. There are a few people finally getting it.<p>Edit: And my quick glance of Economists data suggest they simply classify company by their HQ location. But not by their ownership and shareholding structure. Not that it makes substantial differences, just the numbers are higher than what is shown.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29489132" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29489132</a><p>[2] Wrote about YMTC on SemiWiki in <i>2018</i>. And their relationship with Apple.
The thing with outsourcing is, the vendor will themselves set up shop wherever the customer wants. In this case all the chinese companies are simply setting up plants in India and Vietnam, so they end up not losing any business in the short term. Same thing happens with software. All of the India consulting firms set up shop all over the world, for example Mexico to provide similar time zones to their US customers yet reduce costs. The customer gets to say we are not relying on country X and the vendor still has that contract.
I tried looking around to get how much of the iPhones are actually made in India and couldn’t find any clear information.<p>Apple seems to be relying on Foxconn’s Indian subsidiary, and it is described as an assembly partner, so I’d expect all the parts and chips to be coming from neighboring countries (so mostly China?)<p>It is still a pretty big deal, but my assumption would be that aside from the trumpeting headlines, Apple and Foxconn are still deeply depending on China at this point and will stay so for many years to come ?
Very insightful. It corrected a lot of incorrect information I had on this issues.<p>1. Labor cost is an issue but at 530 per month as of 2020 Chinese mfr labor is still relatively cheap and only twice as expensive as India.<p>2. Sales in China peaked in 2015-6 in terms of percentage of revenue for Apple<p>3. Despite the move, analysts predict 80% of Apple products will still be made in China by 2025.
To me, I think that Apple's reliance on China, and Taiwan, was and is an extremely risky and misguided decision. Imagine if Apple had developed a total reliance on chip factories built in, say, Ukraine, back in 2018. That's about where we are now with Taiwan and China, I believe.<p>It's sure been profitable - but at, I would argue, obscene risk. A few years of TSMC being unavailable would have Apple on life support. Apple would actually be worse off than many companies and the ditching Intel decision would do a total 180 into a massive mistake. Nobody cares if you have higher-performance products if you can't make them.<p>Edit: For those saying that can't happen, think Ukraine in 2012 or 2018. Russia? Invading? Can't happen. For Taiwan, China, invading? Can't happen.
The cynical side of me senses that what would land with India and Vietnam is labor-intensive, commoditized assembly of parts. "X% of iPhones manufactured in India" is sort of misleading if the bulk of parts are still coming from China. In some ways, I think this is going China's way. They are moving up the ladder into specialized manufacturing and away from manual labor. A smart strategy considering the demographic decline they are to face in upcoming decades.<p>On the other hand though, it would be foolish to expect the whole industry moving away from another country overnight. It would be a slow process that would start from the labor intensive parts of manufacturing. I think, it'd be a win-win for everyone, including China.
This is all part of the "Great Decoupling" that will happen in the next decade. Apple will be hurt by this, no doubt, since it will not be able to find suitable replacement suppliers for some of its components, and it's loath to buy from Samsung, its biggest rival.<p>Ergo, Apple may go down when push comes to shove and the U.S. government gets into a tangle with China.
This isn't news -- Apple opened factories in a bunch of SE Asian countries IIRC, and now stands poised to play them off each other since the old model of showing up and being shocked there are human rights abuses in... not just Xinjiang.<p>Apple's real affair, along with the rest of the tech industry, is with countries like Ireland and Austria are "neutral" in the sense that they allowed untaxed gains to flow into them much like Switzerland did in WWII.<p>They need to adjust to a world where people may buy their devices every two, three, even five years and hold onto them -- especially since China has control of those rapidly depleting rare earth mineral deposits that you need for the overly thin batteries.<p>Or folks can switch to Android, who seemed to have gone full Pirates of Silicon Valley and stolen the good features from iOS, last I poked around someone's phone.<p>(Let's be real: at this point they're just doing tweaks, not coming up with major enhancements.)