As part of Tim Cook’s plan to strengthen ties with China-based suppliers and enhance relations with the Chinese Communist Party, the company’s Chinese partner, Luxshare Precision Industry Co, is poised to take over an iPhone assembly site from Taiwanese competitor Pegatron Corp.
Debby Wu for Bloomberg News:
Luxshare is set to buy a 62.5% stake in Pegatron Corp.’s Kunshan unit in eastern China for about 2.1 billion yuan ($300 million), according to an exchange filing by the latter on Thursday. Taipei-based Pegatron currently assembles iPhones at its Kunshan campus and another site in Shanghai.
The acquisition is expected to give Luxshare a better chance at competing with Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group, Apple’s primary manufacturing partner. Foxconn makes about 70% of all iPhones with the bulk assembled at its main site in central China.
Apple has been cultivating Chinese suppliers including Luxshare, seeking to boost its standing in Beijing. The Cupertino, California-based company relies on the Greater China region for about 20% of its total sales, prompting Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook to say in March that the company’s relationship with the world’s second-largest economy is a symbiotic one.
Luxshare’s prominence within the Apple supply chain has risen swiftly in recent years. It now makes a range of products for the US customer, including iPhones, Apple Watch and mixed reality headset Vision Pro. In October, Cook visited a Luxshare plant and praised the Chinese company’s commitment to help Apple reduce carbon emissions.
MacDailyNews Take: What a tenuous tightrope Cook has forced Apple to walk.
Please help support MacDailyNews. Click or tap here to support our independent tech blog. Thank you!
Support MacDailyNews at no extra cost to you by using this link to shop at Amazon.
Do you think North Americans will provide that labour force? Not on your life would they work under those conditions. Your iPhone would cost double to make that happen.
Tim likes communists. He is uncomfortable with free market capitalists who like the Constitution.
“Free market capitalism” is the favorite slogan of rapaciously greedy, monopolistic, globalist corporations. I don’t know what TC thinks about the Constitution of the United States, but he’s one of the most uber-capitalists in human history.
“As part of Tim Cook’s plan to strengthen ties with China-based suppliers and enhance relations with the Chinese Communist Party…”
What could possibly go wrong?
This is incredibly stupid and short sighted, wilfully blind, in fact. In what world does supporting an authoritarian regime ever work out well in the long run? It is morally wrong to support repressive regimes to begin with, and it’s morally wrong to support authoritarians. That’s been the problem for decades, the west has been helping dictatorships evade the failure of that system, and the horrors perpetrated by them, and then they become menaces to world peace, as is happening with Russia against Ukraine, Iran and its terrorist ties throughout the Middle East, including Hezbollah and Hamas, and China’s menacing of a free country like Taiwan. And then Apple wants to further encourage that? F’g stupid.
Hey Ron, it seems to me that we here in the US of A are suffering under a pretty repressive and authoritarian regime right now.