Apple Spent $60B on 9,000 American Suppliers in 2018, Supporting 450,000 Jobs (macrumors.com) 54
An anonymous reader shares a report: Well timed with a report from The New York Times today that explained why Apple is unlikely to manufacture more of its products in the United States, Apple has published a press release highlighting how several components it uses are manufactured by U.S. suppliers such as Finisar, Corning, and Broadcom. Apple says it spent $60 billion with 9,000 American component suppliers and companies in 2018, an increase of more than 10 percent from the year before. Apple says this spending supports more than 450,000 jobs in the United States.
They'd probably like to spend more (Score:2)
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You know what would be funnier than sending Trump to jail?
Build his fucking giant Mexico-USA border wall, remove his USA citizenship and then deport him to Mexico.
SNOPES (Score:2)
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"By U.S. Suppliers", not "in the U.S." (Score:1)
Note that they say they're manufactured "by U.S. suppliers" - but not that they're made IN the U.S.
By that standard, iPhones are provided by a U.S. supplier. They just happen to be manufactured by slave labor in China.
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Note that they say they're manufactured "by U.S. suppliers" - but not that they're made IN the U.S.
Yep. From the FAQ section of Finisar's website:
Where does Finisar operate and how many employees does Finisar have?
Finisar's corporate headquarters is located in Sunnyvale, CA, while its primary manufacturing facilities are located in Ipoh, Malaysia, Shanghai, China, and Wuxi, China. Finisar fabricates its VCSEL lasers for datacom applications in Allen, TX, operates a fab in Fremont, CA for making DFB and FP lasers for longer distance datacom and telecom applications, and operates a tunable laser fab in Jarfalla, Sweden used primarily in our tunable XFP transceivers, primarily for telecom applications. The Company also has manufacturing and R&D facilities in Horsham, PA (USA) and as well as Australia, Germany, Korea, and Singapore. Finisar employs approximately 13,000 employees worldwide.
So the Apple products are probably made in the primary facilities in Malaysia and China.
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"American Made" is synonymous with "Garbage", world-wide. Has been the case longer than I've been alive. It seems like the only people who don't understand this are the Americans.
There are a lot of niche products that are "American Made" that are pretty good, but this is because the company making them actually cares about their product. Mass manufacturing in the USA (electronics, cars, white goods) is pitiful - American cars, for eg, are laughably bad, overpriced garbage. High quality Japanese cars destroy
Apple PR Success (Score:5, Insightful)
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You break the articles down wrong. Neither was directly about how great Apple is for the economy. The 1st was: "it's difficult for Apple to manufacture in the US, and here's why." It was information, rather than argumentative. Apple released a press statement: "actually we do a lot of manufavcturing in the US."
Obviously what happened is that Apple was interviewed for the NY Times article, knew it was coming out, and released their own press statement to counteract the negative implications.
60 billion / 450,000 (Score:5, Insightful)
Did I do the math right, that's like $133,000 a job? Wonder what percentage of that makes it to the workers?
Re:60 billion / 450,000 (Score:4, Interesting)
Ha! That's 60$ billion TOTAL COST, not just labor.
I'd say 2 - 3/5ths of that is going towards labor.
So anywhere between $50 - $80k
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When you buy anything, all of the costs are labor or profit.
I buy a product from Amazon. Somebody paid shipping which a small part goes to the mailman who dropped it at my door, and the guys who drove the trucks from city A to city C, and the people who moved the items from truck X to truck Y, and the people who sorted them in between. Obviously the manufacturer paid their people to produce it. But all of the stuff purchased as components were paid to people who made the screens, buttons, circuit boards, et
Re:60 billion / 450,000 (Score:5, Insightful)
When you buy an iPhone, most of the money goes to Apple's cash account, sitting off shore waiting for the next tax avoidance scheme to be implemented.
They're up to nearly $300 billion in cash reserves.
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As was pointed out below the 450, 000 jobs most likely included those knock on jobs. But just because Apple spent money with the companies in the US doesn't mean all of that money stayed within the US. Just like when you buy an iPhone, iPad, or Mac in the US, not all of your money stays within the US. Some of that goes to those suppliers in the US. There are also supplies in Asia that are paid. Most of the actual components are fabricated in Asia so money ends up there for that. I would bet that many of th
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That wi
Re:60 billion / 450,000 (Score:5, Insightful)
Who knows what their methodology was? Did they disclose it? They could have just summed up the employment figures of all the suppliers they do business with for all I know.
And then maybe added in the knock on employment as well.
For example, a mill or a mine can effectively 'create' a whole town. The mine just pays the mine workers, the mine workers in turn use their salaries for everything from kitchen renovation contractors to haircuts from mcdonalds burgers to daycare for their kids... and the mine takes "credit" for the entire job market of the town. And its not even 'wrong'... because we've all seen a mine close and the town die.
Suppose also that an ore refinery in the next town over has a contract to buy all the ore from that mine for $1 billion a year. It *can* claim that $1 billion is creating all the jobs in the town. And its not "wrong" because its supporting the mine... But you obviously can't just take a dollar amount and divide it by people to figure out an average salary in a calculation like this. A big chunk of that money was paying for the output of the mine itself... the actual ore to refine. And this is of course a super simplistic example.
But the point is there are economic 'models' one can use, and methodologies one can use for estimating how many 'jobs' you create with an investment of size X in an industry Y.
And all kinds of ways of stretching and abusing and oversimplifying those estimates if you just want a good PR puff piece and only care about 'somewhat plausible' vs 'accurate'.
Globalism as it should be (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words, despite what propagandists love to spout, the economy is global, and buying from anywhere creates jobs everywhere. It's stupidly short-sighted to focus on one particular industry in one particular location, because global shipping is so cheap that it's more cost-effective to move parts around than to stand up a local manufacturing process.
Buy parts from country A, built components in B and C, assemble in D, sell to E. Everybody benefits a little bit, and the end result is a product that's cheap enough to be reasonably affordable.
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Buying from anywhere creates a few very high paying jobs in USA and many many more jobs in China and Taiwan.
Translation (Score:1)
that's heaps... (Score:4, Interesting)
All $60 billion went the those companies Chinese subsidiaries.
They're saying it like they're unique in the industry.
Most midrange or better smart phones have Corning glass. They'll probably also have Broadcom, Qualcomm or Intel chips in them.
It's probably only Samsung that isn't full of American designed chips (of which only Intel are probably made in USA, the rest at TSMC) but they'll still have Corning glass.
Assembly of electronics, not worth much (Score:1)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/12/24/china-makes-almost-nothing-out-of-apples-ipads-and-i/#12655dbc60b4
A report was done on the value of iPhone components, and assembly by different nations. China's assembly value was 1.8 percent of the iPhone's total cost. Assembly can also move to cheaper nations, like Vietnam.
9,000 Suppliers. (Score:3)
More like 2 million (Score:2)
Since 2011, the total number of jobs created and supported by Apple in the United States has more than tripled — from almost 600,000 to 2 million across all 50 states.