Steve Jobs (Image via Wikipedia)
While Apple added 8,000 people to its American workforce last year, some people contend that wasn’t enough.
And although Apple’s overall U.S. employement is at an all-time high, there are those who believe Apple bears an obligation to push those numbers even higher.
A year ago, when President Barack Obama asked the late Steve Jobs about whether Apple might begin manufacturing the iPhone in the United States instead of abroad, Jobs reportedly replied, “Those jobs aren’t coming back.”
As the most-valuable company on the planet and one of its most admired, Apple is a natural target for scrutiny, analysis, conjecture, and myth-making. And in a compelling story this week about that most-compelling company, the New York Times manages to touch on all of those perspectives.
In How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work, the Times explores the remarkable global-operations powerhouse that Apple has become in the past decade as its products have become among the most sought-after and influential of any company on Earth.
The Times story also chooses to delve into everything from U.S. education policy to industrial policy to corporate obligations, and to note—for reasons I can’t quite comprehend—that “what has vexed Mr. Obama as well as economists and policy makers is that Apple — and many of its high-technology peers — are not nearly as avid in creating American jobs as other famous companies were in their heydays.”
While the article goes on to touch on some of those reasons, at the same time it seems intent on pushing the point that Apple, because it was founded in and is still headquartered in the United States, should employ more people in the U.S. than it currently does because . . . well, because that’s what big U.S.-based companies did 50 or 60 or 100 years ago.
Although that puzzling ideological strain runs throughout the long but relentlessly gripping article, the overall piece is terrific and should be read by anyone who’s even remotely interested in global business, Apple, technology, education, supply chains, leadership, and/or competitiveness.
And for a hint of what's in store, here are 10 astonishing details from the article:
1) In 2011, Apple made and sold 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads, and 59 million other products.
2) In 2011, Apple’s profit per employee was $400,000.
3) Apple employes 63,000 people in the U.S.—an all-time high—while its contractor partners employ 700,000 people.
4) Each iPhone contains hundreds of parts: semiconductors from Germany and Taiway, memory from Korea and Japan, display panels and circuitry from Korea and Taiwan, chipsets from Europe, and rare metals from Africa and Asia. And all of that is assembled in China.
5) “For tech companies, the cost of labor is minimal compared with the expense of buying parts and managing supply chains that bring together components and services from hundreds of companies,” the article says. (Apple, by the way, uses SAP software to help run that extraordinary global supply chain.)
6) To oversee the 200,000 assembly-line workers making iPhones, Apple estimated, it would need 8,700 industrial engineers. Hiring them in the U.S. would take 9 months, Apple projected. But in China, those 8,700 industrial engineers were hired in 15 days—that’s more than 24 per hour.
7) At the “Foxconn City” complex where iPhones are assembled, Foxconn employs 230,000 workers, with 25% of those living within the complex in company dormitories.
8) The scale at these megafactories in China is unmatched anywhere in the world: a former Apple supply demand manager says, “They could hire 3,000 people overnight.”
9) “The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? The factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take 3 hours.”
10) “Though Americans are among the most educated workers in the world,” the article says, “the nation has stopped training enough people in the mid-level skills that factories need, executives say.”
If you think these anecdotes and excerpts are intriguing, you’ve got to read the entire piece—afterward, you might well think differently about your job, your company, and maybe even the future of your country.
(Follow me on Twitter at bobevansSAP.)
RECOMMENDED READING:
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