The Information reports Thursday on Apple’s growing relationships with Chinese electronics manufacturers, explaining that Apple has increased its reliance on Chinese partners, both as a way of cutting costs as well as to curry favor with the Chinese Communist Party.
Earlier this month, The Information reported a secret deal between Apple CEO Tim Cook and Chinese Communist Party officials in which Apple committed to investing more than $275 billion in China over a period of five years in exchange for regulatory exemptions.
Luxshare has the potential to unseat Foxconn as Apple’s top supplier. The Chinese company already exceeds Foxconn’s main publicly listed unit in terms of market capitalization, though Foxconn generated roughly $105 billion from Apple in 2020—more than 10 times Luxshare’s haul. But in terms of valuation, Luxshare has also eclipsed major Apple contractors such as Quanta Computer, Pegatron and Wistron, all of which are headquartered in Taiwan. Foxconn has become increasingly concerned about Luxshare’s meteoric rise, including its significantly higher net profit margin, going so far as to form a task force to study the company, Reuters previously reported…
In shifting more business to Chinese companies, Cook, the architect of Apple’s supply chain in China, is fulfilling his pledge to Beijing to expand its domestic tech industry, which will help the country reduce its reliance on companies based outside the mainland, including Taiwan — a country China considers a renegade region. A year after Cook signed the economic agreement with China, Luxshare became the first Chinese company to secure a final assembly contract for a major Apple product, the AirPods, ending the dominance of Taiwanese firms.
Apple’s moves also might win over more Chinese consumers, which at times have shunned Apple in favor of local brands like Huawei based on nationalism. Apple generates nearly 20% of its revenue from the country.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s perfidious “leadership” continues to disappoint.
Athletes, so many actors, so many celebrities… are just scared to say a word because they care too much about their endorsement deals, their contract situations, their movies sales, but I feel like everything that they’re trying to get from the Chinese Communist Party is not more important than morals, values, and principles.
We need to be the voice of all of those innocent people out there who don’t have a voice… while we’re speaking [now], the genocide is happening. It’s so important to be the voice of all of those people in concentration camps – almost 2 million people… what they’re going through is heartbreaking.
So, I don’t care what you offer me. I don’t care. It is important to stand up for what’s right.
— Enes Kanter Freedom
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The Chinese Communist Party is committing genocide on a massive scale (not to mention also released a bioweapon – COVID – to try to get rid of a U.S. president who was making things very difficult for them in favor of a beholden puppet) and Mr. Human Rights (bullshit) Tim Cook is literally helping to fund these atrocities.
So you’ve come out of the closet as a Social Justice Warrior!
This is so misguided, ridiculous and rather sad comment. Evidence please?
Maybe Apple could just shut all the factories down next week and move them somewhere else. That would only take about 20 or 30 years. Problem solved.
Yes, and Apple is doing the same in India. And every other major company does the same in every municipality where they wish to do business. It has been that way ever since Pharaoh paid the contractor to stack the rocks in a triangle.
Is India interning and killing their own citizens in hundreds of concentration camps?
No.
Did India engineer and release a bioweapon because a U.S. president made life difficult for them and disrupted their business ambitions?
No.
You are an apologist fool.
Says the guy typing away on his Chinese made device.
I’ll assume that since you are on this site that you are an Apple fan. Have you owned any Chinese made Apple products (or ANY products, for that matter) in the last 30 or 40 years? If so, well, you get my point. YOU are part of the problem.
One star? You must be a Samsung guy!
Why would the Chinese Communist Party need to “curry favor” with a company it runs?
Celebrating Apple’s intraday closing highs and deploring Apple’s close relationship with Communist (in name only) China is contradictory. It celebrates market forces, however, in the Keynesian economic sense, you know, where the corporation’s fiduciary duty to investors is the core duty and nothing else matters gives excuse to making favorable deals with idealogical competitors such as China, Viet Nam, and Saudi Arabia.
This is pure conjecture.
Wow! You guys discovered this! This is certainly the very first time China EVER required a commercial firm seeking to do business in their vast market to support the development of their industry. Dow Chemical, IBM, Exxon etc. were allowed over the years to just “come on in and sell your stuff”. No problem. But AAPL was required to bend over.
This article is the absolute height of stupidity. Duh.
Apple needs a CEO that knows business 101. Diversification. If apple had production plants in Europe, South America, and yes, in the US, even if it was only 5% of supply, it wouldn’t be held up at gunpoint every time some commie F’er in china says ‘jump’.
That cook STILL hasn’t learned this lesson is GROSS INCOMPETENCE. He’s got to go.
Tim Cook is above your pay grade grasshopper, and Foxconn ain’t working in Brazil and India won’t work either…