Apple’s heavy reliance on China for product assembly is increasingly a liability, one that, to some observers, been a major risk for many years.
See: Tim Cook firmly latched Apple onto China’s CCP teat. What’s his plan for weaning it off? – November 2, 2022
Apple is belated trying to reduce this potentially crippling dependence, The Information reports, but the Chinese Communist Party is creating significant obstacles.
Wayne Ma for The Information:
Earlier this year, Chinese authorities refused to allow one of Apple’s Chinese equipment suppliers to export machinery to India that Apple needed for the upcoming iPhone 17’s trial production, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter. So the supplier got creative.
It set up a front company in Southeast Asia to buy the machines. Once the equipment reached the Southeast Asian country, it went to a factory in India operated by Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that builds most of Apple’s iPhones in China, the people said…
In many cases, Chinese authorities are delaying or blocking shipments of iPhone equipment to India without explanation, according to multiple people involved in iPhone production.
Foxconn has seen approval times from Chinese authorities for exporting iPhone-making equipment from its China factories to those in India rise from two weeks to as long as four months, one of the people said. They are also rejecting some export applications without explanation, the person added.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote back in November 2022:
Tim Cook painted Apple into this corner. It worked marvelously well, until it didn’t.
A publicly traded company CEO’s job is to act in the best interest of its shareholders.
But, Apple’s operations don’t scream “genius” today. They scream “RISK!” But, you know, the market just loooves risk…
Apple shareholders and, in turn, Apple’s rubber-stamping Board of Lackeys, should hold one person responsible if this spiraling China dilemma continues deteriorate: Timothy D. Cook.
Every move Apple makes to extricate itself from the corner into which Tim Cook painted it — every assembly plant, desperately and late, that’s opened in India, Vietnam, and anywhere outside of China — increases tensions with Chinese Communist Party-controlled China, a country in which Apple depends on maintaining huge iPhone and other products’ sales, but which can be turned off like a spigot at any time the CCP so desires. – MacDailyNews, January 3, 2024
Read more:
• Why Apple CEO Tim Cook capitulates to China: Money and power – August 14, 2017
• Tim Cook is not the best person to be CEO of Apple – April 2, 2019
• Apple CEO Tim Cook’s continued kowtowing to China is a very bad look – October 10, 2019
• Tim Cook’s Apple is built in China; now it has to answer to the Chinese Communist Party – May 17, 2021
• Four U.S. Congressmen: Apple is ‘a pawn in China’s malfeasance’ – May 21, 2021
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