Video Of Tim Cook Explaining Why Apple Manufactures Its Products In China Viral Again

Any Apple device you own, including your iPhone and iPad, will have the words “Assembled in China” on its back. Many are perplexed as to why the tech giant decided to move all of its manufacturing units abroad, primarily to China. People often assume that China has cheap labour, which is why so many tech behemoths have established manufacturing plants there. Apple frequently faced similar accusations. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, stated that the company chooses China for skill rather than low wage costs.

“The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labour costs. The truth is China stopped being a low labour costs country many years ago,” Cook said.

“The reason is because of skill, the quantity of skill in one location and the type of skill it is,” he added.

Cook added that the products need sophisticated tooling and that using state-of-the-art materials and tooling requires precision. He also mentioned that China has “very deep” tooling skills.

Cook emphasised that, when comparing the US with China, tooling engineers could fill a room at a meeting in the US. But in China, you could accommodate many football fields.

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, replied to the Apple CEO’s remarks by commenting, “True.”

The video, which has 6 million views, drew comments.

A user explained, “It started as cheap labour, then they became highly skilled and invested in manufacturing infrastructure, meanwhile we forgot how to build at scale and became reliant on them to do anything. Then they raised the costs of labor and now we have no other option.”

Another user criticised Cook’s comments saying, “Don’t people literally throw themselves off of Apple’s factories so much that they had to install suicide prevention netting?”

A third user mentioned, “That’s a kind way of saying “China has more skilled labour per capita than the US or any other place on earth”.”

Cook’s statements were met with disbelief in the comments section, with users pushing for US financing of a similar skill set instead of reliance on foreign workers.