Tag Archives: Apple

Can Cook Take the Heat?

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CEO Tim Cook has taken to the Apple airwaves, rebutting claims made by The New York Times and others that company indirectly contributes to worker abuse but not rejecting Foxconn as a supplier.

In a letter, published yesterday by 9to5mac, Cook wrote, “Every year we inspect more factories, raising the bar for our partners and going deeper into the supply chain. As we reported earlier this month, we’ve made a great deal of progress and improved conditions for hundreds of thousands of workers. We know of no one in our industry doing as much as we are, in as many places, touching as many people.”

I’ll address the second point first. It’s true Apple has been singled out for bad corporate behavior toward Third World workers, while companies such as Dell and H-P are equally reliant on their supply chains (often the same suppliers), yet receive far less flak. It says here Apple is getting the brunt of bad publicity for good reason. The company has struck a wholly sanctimonious tone toward those who dared criticize its leadership. It has been strident in its support of Foxconn, the biggest (in size and in number of incidents) purveyor of recorded worker abuses. Apple on any given day is the largest (by market capitalization) company in the world. If a critic wants to make a point at a company’s expense, who better than Apple? Frankly, HP and Dell have been so beset by internal management problems, attacking them for supply-chain problems seems somewhat quaint by comparison.

As for the first point (“Every year we inspect more factories, raising the bar for our partners and going deeper into the supply chain.”), the truth is Apple does not visit every one of its suppliers every year. In 2011, Apple conducted 229 audits, 100 of which were first-time audits. According to the company, 97% of Apple’s procurement expenses are from 156 vendors. Incredibly, by Apple’s own admission, the logic says it audited many of its suppliers for the first time in 2011. (Either that, or the math isn’t working out, unless Apple is churning its supply base — composed primarily of well-known companies in their respective fields — with great rapidity, or that supply base is adding new plants with even greater rapidity, because the number of first-time audits has been at or over 100 three years running.)

I commend Apple for bringing some degree of transparency to the issue. But the numbers don’t quite add up. Nor does the nagging feeling that Apple, which perhaps has no parallel when it comes to leveraging a supply chain for competitive advantage, could effect positive change at places like Foxconn and Pegatron, if only it were willing to shoulder the financial risk.

When you have $100 billion* in the bank, you can afford to stop by each of your suppliers at least once a year. And when you’re the biggest company in the world, and apparently comfortable lecturing anyone else on what they should think, then you’d better be able to handle the blowback. If Cook can’t handle the heat, he should get out of the kitchen.

*Actually $97 billion.

When Did Illiteracy Become a Skill?

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Making its way around the blogosphere is this New York Times’ article detailing the migration of Apple from the US to China.

According to the piece, Americans, Apple asserts, can’t match “the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers.” “We shouldn’t be criticized for using Chinese workers,” a current Apple executive said. “The US has stopped producing people with the skills we need.”

With all due respect to the late Mr. Jobs, this is complete bull.

When all manufacturing equipment needs to be icon-based because the migrant workers who run it can’t read, that hardly qualifies as “flexible.” “Dumbed-down” is more like it. Since when is illiteracy a skill?

American engineering prowess is second to none. It’s difficult to find even a single feature — voice calling, GPS, web browsing, MP3 — on an iPhone that wasn’t invented at least in part in the US. The ideas conceived daily by our military contractors are matched only by their amazing ability to turn those ideas into reality. We have developed, for example, a weapon system that begins as an 18″ inch tube, but when launched, “sprouts” rigid wings like a hawk and rises thousands of feet, where it is invisible to detection. That device can then zero in on a designated target miles away, and once locked on, will thrust itself toward its “prey” — even if the latter is moving — and plant its payload — a bomb — in its target’s chest.

By contrast, what exactly is it Steve Jobs’ conceived — the rectangle?

Another current Apple executive reportedly said, “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.” Non sequitur aside, what that arrogant remark ignores, of course, is that without American laws, Apple likely would no longer even exist. Indeed, Bill Gates provided then-struggling Apple with $150 million in 1997 and US anti-trust laws for years forced Microsoft to capitulate on its bundled software products in order to keep the competition alive.

There’s another missing point. High volume manufacturing is still performed all over the US, just not in electronics. So as we move toward more lights-out/true full automation factories for building electronics, there’s no reason to think that product won’t be built in volume here, too. Keep in mind that following the flooding in Thailand and Malaysia and the earthquake in Japan, the cluster factory model so popular in Southeast Asia is not looking quite so good.

And another! Apple’s outsourcing overseas model works well for building mobility products. It doesn’t work so well when you are outsourcing tractors. Jobs’ hubris led him to extrapolate that he since so good in design, he must also be brilliant in economics and sociology. Not even.

Apple now has nearly $100 billion in cash on hand. But it can’t afford American engineers? Huh.

How Much Would You Pay?

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Would you be willing to pay for more “fair-trade” electronics?

The host of This American Life, a public radio show based in Chicago, revives that debate in a recent segment on Mike Daisey —  the author of The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs — and his visit to Shenzhen (so polluted, it looks like “Bladerunner threw up on itself”).

The issue over China’s labor practices, the show finds, boils down to that question.

 

Apple’s Enablers

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Another Apple supplier — this time Pegatron — has blown up. Fortunately this time no one died, but 61 workers were injured, 23 badly enough to require hospitalization.

In the wake of the accident, I’m sure we’ll be treated to all the usual platitudes about how seriously Apple takes its corporate citizenship, an argument that becomes harder to swallow with each passing disaster.

How long are we going to operate under the premise that consumers actually care about where their products come from? “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

 

The Genius of Apple’s Supply Chain

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A massive competitive advantage for Apple is its operations function. Specifically, its supply chain operations. Apple has a regimented core business vision — built around their supply chain.

“They have a very unified strategy, and every part of their business is aligned around that strategy,” said Matthew Davis, a supply-chain analyst with Gartner (IT), who has ranked Apple as the world’s best supply chain for the last four years, as quoted by Bloomberg/BusinessWeek in a recent story on same.

It’s well known that recently Google paid $12 billion for Motorola’s cultivated, global supply chain. That fact, combined with observations about the genius of Apple’s supply chain — genius which is apparently 90% perspiration and 10% inspiration, by the way — make it clearer why a supply line could be worth so much money.

This is the world of manufacturing, procurement, and logistics in which the new chief executive officer, Tim Cook, excelled, earning him the trust of Steve Jobs. According to more than a dozen interviews with former employees, executives at suppliers, and management experts familiar with the company’s operations, Apple has built a closed ecosystem where it exerts control over nearly every piece of the supply chain, from design to retail store. Because of its volume—and its occasional ruthlessness—Apple gets big discounts on parts, manufacturing capacity, and air freight. — Adam Satariano and Peter Burrows, reporters for Bloomberg

The bottom line, according to Satariano and Burrows, is that Apple plans to double spending on its supply chain, to $7.1 billion — continuing its focus on streamlining and controlling manufacturing.

Relative to Google’s $12 billion to procure part of a new one, once again it seems to make financial sense to invest in current accounts rather than invest in new.

Excellent article on Apple’s supply chain can be found here.

Researchers’ Take on Trade Wars Hard to Swallow

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A group of researchers are asserting that onshoring low-cost manufactured goods back from China would not solve the US’s current economic woes.

The cost of an Apple iPad, they point out, includes about $10 for the workers who assemble it (and that may actually be high, from what I’ve heard). Meanwhile, each device sold helps maintain thousands of higher-paying design, software, management and marketing jobs.

OK, that’s all believable. But it’s the next part is harder to stomach. “Without China, Apple couldn’t be so successful and Apple products wouldn’t be so affordable,” said Yao Shujie, professor of economics at the University of Nottingham in England.

Not so fast. Apple’s margins are by far the highest in the industry. With lower margins, Apple might not be so profitable, but the affordability (an Apple comes at a premium for no other reason than consumers are willing to pay it) is a whole different bag of potatoes. Apple could pay a significantly higher price for onshore EMS work, yet given the fairly low labor content of an electronics assembly, could do so with no effect to the end-product price.

And it says here, those design, software, management and marketing jobs would exist regardless of where the product is manufactured.

Furthermore, the researchers extrapolate from this the idea that the effects a big change in the price of the yuan would have on US manufacturing would be fairly limited in scope. “Multinational firms that think currency appreciation is going to have a big effect on their export capacity from China to the United States are going to shift to other countries, not to the United States,” one researcher said.

Good point. But I would counter that the monies pouring from US consumers into Chinese hands serve to boost the latter’s national coffers, from which its military is deriving great benefit. Cuts in purchases of Chinese-made goods would help reduce China’s ability to assert itself militarily around the world. That would be a positive, too.

Should the US wean itself from its Chinese teat, the benefits would be seen in multiple, if somewhat less obvious, ways.

Why Cook Won’t Change Apple’s EMS Recipe

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New Apple CEO Tim Cook will make no changes to its outsourcing recipe.

That’s my take, based on an assessment of the iPhone maker’s balance sheet.

Cook, of course, has been named to succeed Steve Jobs, who has been fighting a particularly deadly form of cancer.

Foxconn is telling reporters the change at the top won’t impact the companies’ relationship. I couldn’t agree more. It can’t. Much like the US-China relationship, Apple needs Foxconn, and Foxconn needs Apple. Apple carries some $11 billion worth of outstanding off-balance sheet commitments for outsourced manufacturing and components, plus another $1.6 billion committed to manufacturing equipment, presumably for the Foxconn-run plants.

Why would Apple commit all that cash to equipment purchases, when it does not have the internal capacity to build product itself? Because it owns the machines in the Foxconn plant. Although Foxconn has moved much of its Shenzhen campus operations inland to take advantage of lower labor costs, rumor has it the site remains open solely for the benefit of Apple. Apple is said to pay Foxconn roughly $6 for every finished working assembly.

With demand for Apple’s iPads, iPhones, Macs and iPods cresting, it couldn’t leave if it wanted to. If anything, Foxconn is in better position to absorb the loss of Apple than the other way around.

Summer Doldrums

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Is it cyclicality, or … ?

Many reports, anecdotal and evidentiary, point to a general slowing in PCB production and sales over the past quarter.

Yet there are some reasons for optimism:

I am of the mindset that what we are seeing is a return to cyclicality after roughly two years of recession followed by a year-plus of bottled-up demand. Clearly there’s some market turbulence ahead, especially when we take the macro vectors into account. Some of the end-markets need a boost: Now that Windows 7 has taken over, PCs are stagnant, with new tablet demand offset by rather humdrum desktop/laptop interest coupled with some migration to smartphones. Nokia and RIM are skidding, and Apple can’t make up for everyone’s lack of flair. Autos are a big-ticket item and many consumers today need stronger feelings of job security before taking on new debt.

A forecast slowdown in US defense spending (the nation’s fiscal year starts in October) could be partially offset by new deliveries of jumbo passenger jets (Boeing last month announced a record single order and will ship its first Dreamliner next month).

The tea leaves are murky. We hope for the best.

The Tao of Steve

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What will Apple look like after Steve Jobs? And will it remain as successful as it has been over the past decade?

I’ll say it now: No.

Apple won’t sustain its success because its success is unsustainable.

This is a company that has achieved market share as high as 93% for some devices, and continues to dominate in the uber-competitive consumer electronics space. This is a company that has gone from being so close to the grave that none other than rival Microsoft ponied up $500 million just to keep them alive in order to fend off anti-trust regulators (think Bill Gates regrets that decision?) to being the world’s second-most valuable company.

There clearly is something associated with Apple that Sony, Samsung, Dell, HP and legions of other companies haven’t been able to identify, let alone bottle. But even if Steve Jobs were to live to 90 (he’s 56 now, and in failing health), Apple will slide because gravity has this funny way of bringing everything back to Earth.

It doesn’t matter who takes over for Jobs or what he or she does (or doesn’t do). Apple will always be Apple, but it won’t always be the reigning king of consumer electronics.