Tim Cool spoke to that:
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"There's a confusion about China. The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor cost. I'm not sure what part of China they go to but the truth is China stopped being the low labor cost country many years ago. And that is not the reason to come to China from a supply point of view. The reason is because of the skill, and the quantity of skill in one location and the type of skill it is."
And China has an abundance of skilled labor unseen elsewhere, says Cook:
"The products we do require really advanced tooling, and the precision that you have to have, the tooling and working with the materials that we do are state of the art. And the tooling skill is very deep here. In the US you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I'm not sure we could fill the room. In China you could fill multiple football fields."
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If it's truly a skill question alone, US could trivially resolve it by opening the borders to qualified Chinese engineers, until it gets a large enough quantity.
The difference is circumstances aren't forcing the Chinese educated elite to come elsewhere, like my parents, as opportunity exists in China. Even if the probability of success is worse, the question is if the disparity is great enough to outweigh leaving family, friends, and cultural ties behind? Plenty of grad and undergrads are coming to the USA, pit-stopping in the international student community for a few years before heading right back to China. The major bottleneck in China right now is higher level education as many are still compiling resources after getting totally fucked by the government in the Cultural Revolution only 2 generations ago. This is being rapidly solved as the initial generations post Cultural Revolution reach maturity and we will see this differential close in this next generation. My observation is concurrent with the fact that Asian immigration has been significantly slowing both in raw numbers and % wise within the last 10 years, China doesn't have to beat the West, it just has to get close enough.
Trivially asserts that it will be done immediately/soon, which will never happen.
Tim Cook has a business reason to make such a suggestion. He doesn’t want disruption; he wants an affordable and reliable workforce and does not want to abandon his investment in technology, capital, supply chain, etc.
Koenig writes. “Apple is such a huge buyer of a particular kind of mill (BT30 spindle drill-tap centers) that Fanuc, Brother and DMG Mori each have factories dedicated to building machines exclusively for Apple.”
As you can see it would be fairly easy to for Apple/Foxconn to source these parts and build their products in the USA. I think the big motivator for them is they would rather outsource manufacturing to Foxconn and wash their hands of having to deal with it.
I don't see iPhones being made in the US anytime soon, there are many places in Asia other than China that would be higher up the list than the states.
I don't think any other Asia countries has same scale of labor, supply chain and infrastructure to manufacture the goods with tremendous demand like iPhone. It's not just cheap labor, it involves a whole manufacture ecosystem.
Taiwan, Japan, Korea all have the infrastructure and expertise. China is a huge market, but iPhones still are considered imports because they are built in SEZs anyways.
Yeah. I don’t think it’s likely that production would come back —though not impossible.
That said the main point is Foxconn could move production to other manufacturing centers, if need be, though it would need some transition period to avoid disruption.
