<story><title>Apple explores moving 15-30% of production capacity from China</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-china-restructuring/apple-explores-moving-15-30-of-production-capacity-from-china-nikkei-idUSKCN1TK0XN</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>semicolon_storm</author><text>The absolute dependence on China is something I&amp;#x27;m surprised more companies haven&amp;#x27;t tried to combat. There&amp;#x27;s so many efforts to try and diversify to reduce risk, yet almost every hardware company remains at the whims of the Chinese government due to their dependency on Chinese manufacturers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>culturestate</author><text>The idea that the Chinese government could present a material &lt;i&gt;international&lt;/i&gt; threat to your business is really a relatively new one[1]. Immediately after PNTR in 2000 and before the installation of the current regime, it was a a more-or-less stable environment.&lt;p&gt;Today&amp;#x27;s uncertainty really only started to creep in around 2014[2], and in those 14 years the global supply chain concentrated so heavily in and around China that you need to overcome a lot of inertia to move elsewhere. Most attempts to do so until now have been either for low-value mfg - t-shirts or bicycles - or focused on relatively less complicated finishing and assembly stages.&lt;p&gt;1. What I mean here is that in earlier days, you were more likely to be concerned about access to the PRC market and making sure you had strong internal IP protections in place with your contract partners.&lt;p&gt;2. In addition to the politics, this is also around the time it became clear that the Chinese economy in general needed to change, because they were starting to lose out on low-margin products to lower-wage countries.</text></comment>
<story><title>Apple explores moving 15-30% of production capacity from China</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-china-restructuring/apple-explores-moving-15-30-of-production-capacity-from-china-nikkei-idUSKCN1TK0XN</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>semicolon_storm</author><text>The absolute dependence on China is something I&amp;#x27;m surprised more companies haven&amp;#x27;t tried to combat. There&amp;#x27;s so many efforts to try and diversify to reduce risk, yet almost every hardware company remains at the whims of the Chinese government due to their dependency on Chinese manufacturers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>reaperducer</author><text>I think China underestimated the readiness of Western companies to move out. The notion has been that these big companies are locked into these big Chinese factories and can&amp;#x27;t leave.&lt;p&gt;But the reality is that these factories, often as the insistence of the Chinese government, are merely contract manufacturers. If another factory can be located somewhere else at a competitive price, moving production isn&amp;#x27;t as big a deal as if the company actually owned the factory.</text></comment>