Apple's tree of knowledge: Skills are picked up on factory floors

The iPhone maker's skilling has spread far and wide enough for assembly lines in India not to be held ransom by Beijing

- NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA

Apple estimates that it has trained at least 28 million Chinese workers since 2008. That is more people than the entire labor force of California, where Apple Inc is based. This is one of the many stark facts in Apple In China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company, written by Patrick McGee, who reported from China for the Financial Times.

This massive skilling of Chinese workers was one of the building blocks of a sophisticated supply chain that now spreads across the globe. Another building block was massive capital investments into China—an estimated $275 billion in the five years since 2016, for example.

McGee writes that Apple now has a network of 1,500 suppliers in 50 countries. "But all roads lead through China: 90 percent of all production occurs in the country, and its much-vaunted assembly operations in Vietnam and India are no less dependent on the China-centric supply chain".

These two facts—the centrality of worker training and the dependence on China—have come together in recent weeks to complicate Apple's plans to shift more of its mobile phone assembly operations to India. Newspaper reports say that Apple supplier Foxconn has told hundreds of Chinese engineers to return home. They are in India to train Indians employed to work in the new assembly lines. China is also slowing down the supply of machines needed to build these assembly lines.