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"Apple Targets India for Manufacturing. That’s Bad News for China."

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"Apple Targets India for Manufacturing. That’s Bad News for China."

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Nombre de la Compañía: Apple

Nombre del país donde enfrentó el problema: China

Problema:  Apple planea mover el 20% de sus operaciones de China hacia India para frenar su  poderío económico.

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Apple Targets India for Manufacturing. That's Bad News for China.

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Apple is shifting a fifth of its China-based manufacturing to India, in a move that could hasten China's decline as an economic superpower.

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"Apple suppliers among those being pressured by US to leave China"

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"Apple suppliers among those being pressured by US to leave China"

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Nombre de la Compañía: Apple

Nombre del país donde enfrentó el problema: China

Problema: Los proveedores de Apple han sido presionados para dejar China.

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Apple suppliers are among the Taiwanese tech companies being pressured by the White House to move their manufacturing operations away from China, says a new report today.

Washington is said to have "weaponized tech supply chains" against China...

Nikkei reports:

It was a hot summer morning in Taipei when several officials from the American Institute in Taiwan, the de facto U.S. embassy, visited the top management of a major tech company, a key supplier to Apple.

It was immediately apparent that this was unlike previous courtesy visits, where U.S. officials stop in from time to time to hear what's happening in the industry. This time, they cut the chitchat and threw out a blunt question soon after they sat down: 'Why aren't you moving more of your production capacity outside of China?' they asked. 'Why aren't you moving faster?'

Participants described the conversation as 'serious and unsettling' [and] appeared to be an effort to draw those companies over to the US side in the escalating Washington-Beijing tech war, multiple sources with knowledge told Nikkei Asia.

One commentator said that it represented a marked escalation in the US-China trade war.

What started as US government pressure on American companies to boycott specific Chinese entities has since become a concerted effort to force non-US suppliers to join a wholesale blockade of Chinese technology.

'Washington has weaponized tech supply chains, for example, in semiconductors, in order to slow down China's technology ambitions,' said Alex Capri, a research fellow at the Singapore-based Hinrich Foundation and visiting senior fellow of National University of Singapore Business School. The US is aiming to 'suppress Beijing's techno-authoritarianism model,' he said.

The message, as understood by the Taiwanese executives, was urgent: Move production facilities out of China, reduce ties with Chinese clients like Huawei and stand with the US, or face the potential worst-case scenario of becoming Washington's next target.

Three of Apple's biggest suppliers are Taiwanese companies: TSMC, which makes the company's A-series chips - as well as those for the upcoming Apple Silicon Macs - and iPhone assemblers Foxconn and Pegatron.

Apple has been working on diversifying its manufacturing operations to reduce its dependence on China, with assembly plants operating in countries like Vietnam, Thailand, and India. The latter is playing an ever-bigger role, assisted by government incentives.

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Apple suppliers being pressured by US to leave China - 9to5Mac

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Apple suppliers are among the Taiwanese tech companies being pressured by the White House to move their manufacturing operations away from China, says a new report today. Washington is said to have "weaponized tech supply chains" against China... Nikkei reports: It was a hot summer morning in Taipei when several officials from the American Institute in Taiwan, the de facto U.S.

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"Apple has found itself caught between China and the US"

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"Apple has found itself caught between China and the US"

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Nombre de la Compañía: Apple

Nombre del país donde enfrentó el problema: China

Problema: Debido a la tensión política entre Estados Unidos y China, Apple tendrá que re-considerar la locación de sus plantas de producción.

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Dressed in a sombre suit and tie, Apple CEO Tim Cook spent an afternoon in November 2019 showing US President Donald Trump around a large Texan manufacturing plant, where the tech giant plans to make its new MacBook Pro. At one point, Cook handed Trump a ceremonial silver plaque emblazoned with the words: "Mac Pro. Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in USA."

The visit was designed to showcase Apple's commitment to American manufacturing. But behind it lay a much larger question hanging over the company's future: what to do about the vast majority of its products that still carry the words "Assembled in China"?

China is Apple's largest market after the US and Europe, but has been its most important source of new growth for much of the last decade. This rapid expansion has tapered lately, as China's own smartphone market matures and its economy slows, with iPhone sales declining over recent quarters.

Such is China's importance to Apple that, in normal times, this sales reversal would have been Cook's biggest strategic headache. But these are not normal times, and US-China trade tensions present a still greater dilemma over the future of its celebrated China-based manufacturing process, even after an initial deal between the two countries was signed in January 2020.

Apple's supply chain is one of the company's greatest assets: a complex, intricate web that draws components from all around the world to Chinese factories, where they are put together by outsourcers such as Foxconn and Pegatron (both of which are Taiwanese companies that have factories in mainland China). Cook knows the system well, given he designed it during his time as right hand to founder Steve Jobs.

"There's a confusion about China," Cook said a couple of years ago at the Fortune Global Forum in Guangzhou, pushing back against the notion that Apple assembles products there to save money. Instead, he argued, China's deep tech ecosystem makes it the only country capable of providing the right mix of expertise, suppliers and labour at the scale Apple needs.

Even so, as US-China trade tensions have intensified, Apple's reliance on China has become as much a source of weakness as strength. In the US, it risks being attacked by Trump for its reliance on China - hence the very public nature of Cook's factory visit with Trump.

Meanwhile, China's government always has the option of using Apple as a bargaining chip, especially if trade talks with the US break down once again, for instance by restricting access to the crucial rare earth metals needed for smartphone production. Trade ructions have hit Apple's Chinese sales too, as patriotic consumers turn to domestic brands, giving a bump to Huawei in particular.

Apple's role as an employer provides a measure of political protection: it says its activities "support" more than five million Chinese jobs, more than twice as many as in the US. Yet this did not stop it running into trouble with Beijing in October 2019, when it was pressured to remove the mapping app HKmap.live from its app store, following its use by protesters in Hong Kong.

The ongoing trade tensions are now forcing Apple to consider still more drastic scenarios, in particular what would happen if greater technological "decoupling" between the US and Chinese economies forced it to shift large portions of its supply chain away from China.

One short-term option could be to move smaller portions of production elsewhere. Its contract suppliers are opening factories in countries such as Indonesia and Vietnam. During 2019, the words "Assembled in India" also began to appear on iPhones.

But these moves have been small in scale, according to Dan Wang, Beijing-based tech analyst at research group Gavekal Dragonomics. So far, only a tiny fraction of Apple's production is moving from China, largely because of the sheer logistical difficulty of moving facilities to smaller countries that are less well-suited to large-scale IT manufacturing.

"Apple has been hoping the trade war won't worsen, letting it keep its supply chain mostly in China," Wang says. "But if those tensions keep deteriorating, it will have hard decisions to make."
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This article was first published in the May / Jun 2020 issue of WIRED magazine

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Apple has found itself caught between China and the US

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Dressed in a sombre suit and tie, Apple CEO Tim Cook spent an afternoon in November 2019 showing US President Donald Trump around a large Texan manufacturing plant, where the tech giant plans to make its new MacBook Pro. At one point, Cook handed Trump a ceremonial silver plaque emblazoned with the words: "Mac Pro.

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Riesgo Político causado por la guerra comercial entre China y Estados Unidos