> Compared to the cost of buying chips or making sure that you have a plant that can turn out thousands of these things a day or being able to get strengthened glass cut exactly right within, you know, two days of this thing being due, that’s what’s important. Labor is almost insignificant. What is really important are supply chains and flexibility of factories. You want to be able to be located right next to the plant that makes the screws so that when you need a small change to that screw factory, you can go next door and say, “Give it to me in six hours,” and they can say, “Here you go.” Because if that factory was in another state or on another continent, it would take two weeks. It’s the flexibility within the Chinese manufacturing system, that’s what you can do in Asia that you can’t do in the United States.
-- Charles Duhigg, the NYT reporter who wrote the iEconomy piece on Apple’s supply chain and the reason the tech giant doesn’t produce its devices in the U.S.
I'm familiar with this line of reasoning, but I find it unsatisfying and I suspect it's really more of an apologia for American corporate power than a sound history.
Manufacturing was absolutely galloping into China before this sort of tight inter-company integration was even a gleam in anyone's eye, and there's no obvious reason such integration couldn't have developed elsewhere -- except for the labor issues.
The integration that's now heralded as the reason for moving manufacturing to China seems self-evidently a product of such movements to me.
It doesn't seem far-fetched to imagine that manufacturing initially moved to China because of the cheap labor, but that it's stayed there because of the supply chain advantages. Labor in China isn't cheap as it once was, scrutiny of conditions is heightened, and domestic labor isn't as expensive as it once was either.
-- Charles Duhigg, the NYT reporter who wrote the iEconomy piece on Apple’s supply chain and the reason the tech giant doesn’t produce its devices in the U.S.