We shouldn't have gotten into bed with China to begin with. They are ideologically in opposition to everything we stand for, or at least used to stand for before the past four years. We deserve this now.
It's not easy to move the entire supply chain overnight, but we need to start somewhere, and have leadership and a plan to follow, along with incentives to get companies to build parts here.
But it's still not quite that simple because China has a lot of rare minerals that are currently needed for production. We might have to fundamentally change what our devices are made out of and accept that there is going to be a huge price increase to contend with.
That's where China uses the capitalistic system around the world to their advantage by undercutting everyone on price. Capitalism has forced companies in the U.S. to move abroad to keep prices in line with competition. Therefore we add yet another level of complication: We must somehow alter capitalism. That will require either a global effort to get everyone to agree to block trade with China, or to require all manufacturing to be done within each country but at the same time agree to standardized parts and tolerances. Good luck with that.
AND YET, even if we could do all of this, it would likely collapse the Chinese economy, likely resulting in an armed conflict as hundreds of millions starve.
This is the definition of a cluster****.
While many of us would like to cut off China entirely for political, personal or humanitarian ideals, the most sensible and pragmatic approach for Apple to take is do what it’s always been known to do: diversify its supply chain. They have too much reliance on China for too many key components and for assembly and I think they have coasted too long on the promise of growth into China’s vast market while underestimating or overlooking the long game that China has been playing on their dime.
If anyone wants to know what that long game entails, well just search for the various statements made by the leaders of their largest companies and their entertainment industry. They don’t exactly hide their aspirations. Interestingly enough we in the west are the ones obfuscating it all so as to make our partnerships with some of these companies more palatable to the end consumer.
And their aspirations aren’t necessarily evil or weird. They’re common, actually. The problem is that when they are in a position to assert dominance, their party is manic about controlling the narrative and incredibly particular and into minutiae about stopping dissension. Individual freedom just evaporates. They don’t even believe in the concept.
But at the same time, none of this means Apple needs to pull up stakes in China entirely. Apple and other countries doing that would have the catastrophic effect on global security that you predict. They just need to ratchet down their reliance on China. Many companies and entire nations need to do this. Make the 500 pound gorilla lose some weight. But don’t starve him into desperate aggression.
Even if China becomes our kindest ally ever, it would take just another pandemic or some other kind of emergency to really hurt Apple’s business. It would be good business strategy for Apple to be able to switch over assembly to another plant in another country. They might still be operating at reduced output, but that is better than completely frozen output.
All of our businesses may also need to reconsider Just-in-Time manufacturing logistics and consider some sort of buffered version/modification of it.
My generation of leadership has been coasting on a paradigm that no longer exists. We are more interconnected than ever before. We also have more forces for instability than ever before in my lifetime: crazier weather, geopolitical intrigue, potentially catastrophic pressures on the ecosystem from weird funguses and invasive species to name but a few. It goes on and on. Yet so many businesses run on logistic principles that was sold to my generation decades ago. So many of the developed nations run their infrastructure and economies like it’s 1999 or even 1989.
I think many industries and nations with any kind of decent leadership at the helm are taking stock of the weaknesses revealed in the supply chain and assessing how to better mitigate and reduce shortages going forward. Or maybe that’s just a futile fantasy that we have some reasonable adults running things somewhere.
Getting back to Apple, Tim Cook was THE supply chain wonderkid at one time. He needs to apply some of his perspective and experience now as the CEO and reduce Apple’s vulnerability while the various governments provoke each other for whatever agenda they’ve got going on.
China’s population is vast and it’s a lucrative market, but we can’t assume that it will always open or open without a very high price and increasingly choking strings attached. Apple needs to be able to shift out of there, out of India, out of the USA, out of any place that may become unstable and go where the operations are sustainable. They’re global guys now.
Again, this is about Apple. What I want or think as an American consumer is that I’d like to see more jobs available in the US. But we can’t forget that other countries do invest in and provide jobs to Americans. We don’t need to adopt the mantle of nationalistic fervor that can at times border on xenophobia and extremism. Nations need to be measured, mature and apply those traits when asserting themselves.