How China Has Added to Its Influence Over the iPhone
The company’s manufacturing and product design teams began holding late-night video calls with counterparts in Asia. After travel resumed, Apple tried to encourage its staff to return to China by offering a stipend of $1,000 a day during their two weeks of quarantine and four weeks of work, these people said. Though the payout could be as much as $50,000, many engineers were reluctant to go because of uncertainty over how long they would have to quarantine.
In the absence of travel, the company has encouraged staff in Asia to lead meetings that their colleagues in California once led, these people said. They also assumed responsibility for the selection of some Asian suppliers of future iPhone parts.
The company is now increasingly tapping China to supply high-wage workers to do these jobs, these people said. This year, Apple has posted 50 percent more jobs in China than it did during all of 2020, according to GlobalData, which tracks hiring trends across tech. Many of those new hires are Western-educated Chinese citizens, these people said.
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The change in the way Apple works has coincided with an increase in the number of Chinese suppliers it uses. A little over a decade ago, China contributed little value to the production of an iPhone. It primarily provided the low-wage workers who assembled the device with components shipped in from the U.S., Japan and South Korea. The work accounted for about $6 — or 3.6 percent — of the iPhone’s value, according to a study by Yuqing Xing, an economics professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo.
Gradually, China nurtured homegrown suppliers who began to displace Apple’s suppliers from around the world. Chinese companies began making speakers, cutting glass, providing batteries and manufacturing camera modules. Its suppliers now account for more than 25 percent of the value of an iPhone, according to Mr. Xing.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/06/technology/china-apple-iphone.html