From what I’ve read about the sapphire glass Apple often finances/buys the equipment as part of the contract. This makes the contracts extremely one-sided in Apples’ favor.
But I guess the answer right now is ultimately China.
“Tech entrepreneur and academic Vivek Wadhwa said that it will likely take three years or so for Indian suppliers to be capable of the kind of volume production needed to make a noticeable dent in Chinese production.”
I wonder how a war over Taiwan would impact that time table? My guess is that it would slow it even further. India has to know it’s holding all the cards.
If previous world wars are anything to go by, a war with China would come with a shift into a wartime economy. Luxury consumer goods like iphones and cars would be an afterthought at best.
> I wonder how a war over Taiwan would impact that time table?
There won't be any war if China invades Taiwan, merely devastating impact.
If China were to invade Taiwan, the most-advanced chip factory in the world would be rendered “not operable,” TSMC Chair Mark Liu said. “The war brings no winners, everybody's losers,” Liu said. He said an invasion would cause economic turmoil for China, Taiwan and Western countries.[0]
As they say "she was asking for it". Basically they put themselves between rock and hard place. If / when the US will transplant their tech / factories to the US soil or the other safe place they might suddenly loose strong will to protect Taiwan with all their military might.
Thing is this is also still the really basic stuff. It's only going to get worse as they attempt to shift more complicated things.
People tend to drastically underestimate the both the scale and sophistication of manufacturing in China.
For certain products the only reasonable alternatives to China are going to be South Korea and Japan in the medium term as they are the only other hubs with the required sophistication in electronics, batteries, etc.
However you will need to pay a significant premium over China and probably still face lower yields and end up sending said parts somewhere else for final assembly etc.
> Thing is this is also still the really basic stuff. It's only going to get worse as they attempt to shift more complicated things.
Indeed.
And stats like that does make you kind of worry about pharmaceuticals where India is something like number two worldwide as supplier of APIs to the global Pharma industry.
API = Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient, or typically described as "active ingredient" on the labelling of the pills you take.
Disclaimer: I'm not making claims or insinuations here, I've insufficient knowledge of Pharma to do so. I said "makes you think" for a reason, i.e. pure speculation, probably wrong.
Industrial chemistry is not easy but it's still substantially easier than electronics manufacturing and much less reliant on well trained workforce and logistics so it's likely fine but tbh I don't have the background to know either.
Yes, but the issue with pharmaceuticals is safety -- compliance with regulation and close monitoring of medication ingredient quality. That's something that numerous Indian manufacturers continue to have difficulty ensuring.
The difference is India's been an API manufacturing hub for a while now, so I would think the hiccups are likely out of the system at this point. Pharma is also much less manual, and has standards and guidelines like GMP, so generally easier to export.
But to really understand what 50% means in the context of Apple, it would be interesting to see how long it took China to achieve such great numbers in tech manufacturing, and even seeing how long it took India to become acceptable to pharma QA standards
Excluding the recent impurities (NDMA and NDEA) that took losartan, irbesartan, and valsartan off the market for months -- made by Hetero Labs, Mylan Laboratories, and Aurobindo Pharma in India (and Zhejiang Huahai in China)?
> Disclaimer: I'm not making claims or insinuations here, I've insufficient knowledge of Pharma to do so. I said "makes you think" for a reason, i.e. pure speculation, probably wrong
I don’t accept this disclaimer. “makes you …” is not a phrase people use when they’re trying to avoid implications or insinuations. the opposite, in fact, so much so that I’d say that it’s probably as often used seriously as it is humorously to mock conspiracy types who might structure an argument like that.
Disclaimer: I’m not suggesting that you’re making a conspiracy theory, or that I even disagree with your comment, just that the disclaimer doesn’t hold water
My disclaimer was written as is and means exactly what it says, i.e. making clear it was pure speculation and that I knew nothing of the Pharma industry.
In other words, I was openly inviting people to dismiss the comment as worthless.
I'm objecting to you acting as if including a disclaimer negates the exclusive use of "makes you think" to insinuate. if you don't want to imply, don't include a podcast host "but I'm just a dumb guy" disclaimer at the end, use a phrase that isn't 100% always used to insinuate, or don't say it. it's as simple as that
can you see how this works from my reply to your comment? I spent the whole comment slating what you said, then stuck in a disclaimer at the end to point out that I don't really disagree with what you said, nor do I intend to insult you, and yet you still got emotional about it. disclaimers like that are lazy and don't change the fact that you said something. why not just put the same extra effort into making your words more clear?
When I was looking at machining in China (I built some aluminium guitar prototypes) the cost between European fabricators and China wasn't just significant - it was an order of magnitude.
I got a handful of absolutely impeccable prototypes from my Chinese manufacturers, for about 350 USD a piece. The few UK machine shops that even bothered answering my emails and phonecalls quoted about 10-15k per unit.
I'll be honest, pricing in Europe is bonkers for many other sectors too.
We are investing into a drug development project, and had to choose a clinical trial partner. A small no-name European CRO quoted us ~$40 million. An established Indian company with a track record of launching FDA approved products in the US market quoted us $4 million. And they were supposed to be the "marquee" option.
> The few UK machine shops that even bothered answering my emails and phonecalls
Sounds familiar. Just getting someone local to take your money is like pulling teeth sometimes. Eventually went with someone halfway across the the country mostly because they actually bothered to reply at all.
> People tend to drastically underestimate the both the scale and sophistication of manufacturing in China.
Also how little tech workers in India care about what they do.
This isn't a racial observation - Indians outside India are just as conscientious as Asians or Europeans are and are not included in this observation. Rather it's a cultural observation that's probably come about as a result of the outsourcing culture and lack of advancement opportunities that comes along with it.
Are you trying to say the Indian tech workers have much more adult attitude to their employment, as opposed to their western friends who are happy to sacrifice themselves ad maiorem corpo gloriam?
I've observed that as well, with our local Indian developers as compared with the ones in India itself. The effort to come to the US acts as a filter. I've seen the same kind of filter with regards to Mexico. Go to Mexico and they operate on "Mexican Time" (their words, not mine). But when it comes to manual labor in the US, who works the hardest? Mexicans, almost every time. The difference in motivation is stark.
Increased demand stress is part of the filtering process that will expose the brilliant domestic Indian engineers capable of running these operations to international buyers.
Agreed, and incredible given how recently the cultural revolution stymied Chinese intellectualism for decades. Imagine if in the mid 20th century the West had a movement to ban theoretical science research, culled universities, and moved scientists to hard labor. Would the west have been able to bounce back like China has?
The eastern giant we have burdened with our manufacturing processes, logistics, etc has encoded these processes into their identity and are now the experts. Is this bad? Does it HAVE to influence geo-politics so greatly? Can't we all just get along?
Do you think Apple is drastically underestimating the scale and sophistication required to move their manufacturing? Do you think Tim Cook made a strategic error here, owing partially to his lack of understanding of the involvement of these processes?
There will be growing pains moving and scaling manufacturing anywhere. The fact that there are early obstacles and hurdles does not mean we should simply throw up our hands and say "whelp, looks like China is the only option, we have no choice but to stick there!".
Apple is developing manufacturing infrastructure to derisk their supply chain. Because they have 50% rejection rates for iPhone casings at one particular manufacturing facility in India does not really imply anything other than teething issues with scaling up.
The original Financial Times original this blog post is based on fleshes out the issues and obstacles in greater depth IMO and is worth a read:
>Do you think Tim Cook made a strategic error here, owing partially to his lack of understanding of the involvement of these processes?
Appeal to authority is just speculation at the end of the day. It's just as possible a brilliant CEO with tons of supply chain experience made a mistake or was forced into a bad decision.
>The fact that there are early obstacles and hurdles does not mean we should simply throw up our hands and say "whelp, looks like China is the only option, we have no choice but to stick there!".
Is anyone saying that?
>Because they have 50% rejection rates for iPhone casings at one particular manufacturing facility in India does not really imply anything other than teething issues with scaling up.
It does imply at the least that the processes Apple has used in other regions doesn't translate quickly. There are definitely additional questions raised. Is this a labor quality control issue? Procurement? Worse vendors? Or as you speculate, this is all part of the start-up process.
> Do you think Tim Cook made a strategic error here
Honestly, yeah. Doubling down on China was a mistake, and now there are no easy outs for the hardware side of things. Apple tried manufacturing the Mac Pro in the US, but I doubt the numbers on that added up in the US' favor.
Correcting course is the right move to make now, but people were right when they called Apple's Chinese supply chain a deal with the devil. Now the devil has come to take their dues, and the first world is scrambling to make sense of it all.
I'm tired of this "4D chess" mindset around Chinese manufacturing. It's bad for everyone but the Chinese government, and you can't pretend like it's a sustainable mindset. Supporting the systematic oppression, sterilization and execution of entire ethnic groups is not worth a new iPhone next year.
I believe Apples decision isn't based on viability of moving manufacturing to India but rather requirements of the Indian government to access that market.
> People tend to drastically underestimate the both the scale and sophistication of manufacturing in China.
I doubt Apple is underestimating it. Shenzhen wasn't built in a day. They will need to get their reps in before they can start down the path to match China on quality. Apple probably figures it's worth the up front cost to harden against geopolitical risk.
> He also suggested that Apple, too, will need to adapt – especially when it comes to dealing with the bureaucratic government.
I can't imagine how a bureaucratic government could be the cause of a 50% failure rate for these components. More likely apathetic attitudes is the cause of both.
> This 50 per cent “yield” fares badly compared with Apple’s goal for zero defects
Q1: Is Apple QCing everything before shipping to assembly?
Q2: Surely quality issues should be the supplier's problem, not [just] Apple's, and hence a zero defects target should be the supplier's goal, not [just] Apple's?
> Q1: Is Apple QCing everything before shipping to assembly?
Maybe they (seemingly justifiably) had sufficient upfront concerns about quality that they are sampling at a much higher rate than they would normally.
When first qualifying a supplier, I expect IQC to fairly exhaustively test every incoming part. As the supplier gets better at OQC you can start dialing back your IQC.
This is all fairly normal for large scale manufacturing in my experience.
You want everything to meet spec, but the spec won't cover everything, and especially at the beginning the supplier may or may not even be able to meet spec in volume.
> Operations in India are not running at that sort of pace, said a former Apple engineer briefed on the matter: “There just isn’t a sense of urgency.”
> In China, suppliers and government officials took a “whatever it takes” approach to win iPhone orders. Former Apple employees describe instances in which they would estimate a certain task might take several weeks, only to show up the next morning to find it already completed at inexplicable speed.
> Operations in India are not running at that sort of pace, said a former Apple engineer briefed on the matter: “There just isn’t a sense of urgency.”
I am an entrepreneur & a small business owner in India. I did a small manufacturing in China & was blown away by their professionalism. The article mentions - `Chinese suppliers had a totally different attitude, aiming to exceed the Cupertino company’s expectations` - this is so true.
In India, most manufacturing companies or businesses are trying to sell what they have or can produce (without any attention to detail). As a result, false promises & contracts are prevalent. There are no SOP's or any organized sampling process in most Indian companies vs Chinese who keep everything very formal & organized.
I never visited China & the manufacturing went perfect. In India, I personally visited the factories & still could not get the job done. All samples were rejected. Lost money & most importantly time. It's a damn mess. People seriously lack work ethic.
From what I've heard, China also used to be like that, sending out cheap samples that didn't meet the specification, and the manufacturers there would tell you that they'd do it correctly next time, just for the same thing to happen again. But eventually they were able to do a good job. Give it time, Indian manufacturing is simply not as advanced as China's right now but it will be if enough investment is made.
Overpromising and underdelivering is what you do when you can't meet the expectations and you need to try and get the business anyway. What's the alternative? Honestly promise a product no one wants to buy. Once you've manufactured a billion widgets you no longer need to overpromise and underdeliver. It's very similar to the silicon valley "fake it till you make it" attitude.
as someone who has ran a machine shop, that's lovely -- but rare.
95 percent of the shops I have known in the past or worked with currently would sell you their ability to do something while simultaneous upgrading their equipment to match the moment the PO is signed off on.
If fab/machine/mfg shops didn't take on work that was beyond their capability then the smaller groups would starve to death immediately, being unable to use the larger contracts to facilitate upgrades.
The trick is to find a shop operator that is aware of their rate of capability upgrade and turn-around time, that way the delivery dates aren't inaccurate even if the shop capabilities need to be 'tuned' (new machines bought).
I've been burned by overpromising machine shops in Canada. They have eventually delivered but with absolutely unacceptable delays. How does one year sound?
I'm not sure it really is. Dial your time machine back to Victorian London and I bet you would find lots of similarly-run factories. As another poster pointed out, the choices are essentially 1) be honest that you are kind of a bad factory, and can't really produce anything that people want or 2) pretend that you are a great factory, get some business, learn and iterate. Eventually you can honestly promise high quality, but you have to survive that far first.
When your competition is willing to lie and cheat, honesty is a liability that will result in bankruptcy.
Worse, this attitude is endemic in all business sectors where I have worked, and I would be shocked to find a sector where this is not true.
Parent commenter is right, China was like that. The difference is in the root cause: attitude. Whole world is full of ridiculously hard working Chinese people rising up from being an immigrants with nothing and running like the half economies of countries after 50 years.
And Indian immigrants do that too and have risen to be CEOs and Vice Presidents and Prime Ministers and Ministers and in other leadership positions in other countries.
What’s your point?
No idea where “half the economies of countries” is coming from? Citation needed..
This remark applies to all IT outsourcing companies: more billable hours. Love to see how a Chinese IT outsourcing company fares in contrast with TCS, Wipro, Infosys of the world.
China's government effectively owns all of those factories. When something goes wrong, they put their hands directly into the machine to fix it.
Hopefully India's government doesn't follow in their footsteps, Apple's Chinese manufacturers have a spotty track record vis-a-vis exploiting executive power.
Having dealt with multiple electronics component and assembly factories in china... um, no. The government does not "effectively own" all those factories. And no, they do not step in to fix problems.
It's actually the opposite that's true. It was when the Chinese government let go of economy that China got good at manufacturing. I do wonder if India's legacy of heavy state intervention might be the cause of the current issue (from the little that I know about India) and if they would follow a similar trajectory as more companies start to compete. I don't know enough about India to comment on the latter part but my family is ethnic Chinese and we own factories in China. State intervention is definitely not why manufacturing improved in China. There is fierce competition among the companies. Talented managers and leaders are lured away with big salary increases or start their own companies, etc. Ironically, in the beginning a lot of managers who worked for state companies were lured away by enterprising business people to get their factories started. Those same managers would quickly ram up and become more productive once they were motivated with bonuses and freedom to manage, etc.
I would not be too negative on India. I don't see a reason why things won't improve with enough time and motivation.
It is a lot about building relationships with vendors in China. I've dealt with the same issues you describe here with most of my Chinese vendors, usually putting up with them because they were cheap. Those we stuck with are now our best vendors because they realize that it is just easiest to do it properly the first time. I have one vendor that causes our sourcing team to tremble in fear about because of how risky they appear to be, but nobody can beat their prices, service, and quality to us.
The issue of India has always been that it has some serious cultural obstacles to overcome and very little interest in doing so.
Society remains deeply segregated with the caste system being a drag on everything. Religious intelorance is very high and the policians in power seem all to happy to stroke the flame of islamophabia rather than work on solving the actual country problems. Corruption is a reality everywhere and at all levels.
Back to the future has a famous scene where Doc says Japan produces junk. And Marty says they make the best stuff. Reflecting the state of Japan between 1955 and 1985z
Idea is to produce whatever crap you can initially just to get started. Eventually you’ll get better. China is in middle of this cycle.
We have been writing software for decades. Still majority of the software engineers are only good at copy & paste. Things are actually getting worse as most answers you can google, when you can't they are just stuck.
Meh. Potato potato. Engineering titles usually means having an engineering degree, at leat in my part of Europe, which usually means having graduated from a technician university.
Just because your job description calls you a software engineer instead of software developer doesn't make you an engineer in the traditional sense. It's as much value as your job calling you a "senior" after 3 years of experience just to pay you less. As long as your titles aren't transferable between jobs, then they're not real titles.
So I don't get why people argue about these titles. Software engineering is often just overrated digital plumbing work anyway.
To me engineering means doing more safety critical work, similar to designing and building bridges, where people's lives are also on the line, so valid credentials and titles from accredited bodies matter.
What do you think is the difference between dev and engineer then?
I personally don't care about titles or credentials in this racket. Call me a dev, call me an engineer, you can even call ma a clown, i don't care as long as you pay me what I ask.
> I am an entrepreneur & a small business owner in India. I did a small manufacturing in China & was blown away by their professionalism. The article mentions - `Chinese suppliers had a totally different attitude, aiming to exceed the Cupertino company’s expectations` - this is so true.
This varies massively from one CM to the next.
If you can get your foot in the door at the higher tier CMs, the professionalism and attention to detail will be exactly as you described. If you can get in contact with an ambitious smaller CM looking to grow with you (their customer), you can also find great attention to detail.
OTOH, some of the smaller CMs in China will gladly tell you whatever you need to hear in order to send the wire transfer, then you'll get back whatever they feel like delivering. That is if you don't get bumped by a higher paying customer taking your spot on their schedule. You might also get great first articles and have great success on the first prototype run, but then they'll take the A team off of your line and have the night shift run it next time with much less attention to detail.
Not my experience.
I was working on my clothing startup with initial investment of about ~$30,000 USD.
INDIA - Met at least 12-15 manufactures in India (medium to large scale, $1m ARR to $50m ARR). Only a 1-2 of these had any catalogs or samples of different fabric compositions. Most wanted an advance to kick-start the process. Sampling was a total failure with three of these.
CHINA - Contacted about 10 manufactures in China via Alibaba. Each one of them had a very detailed catalog of anywhere in between 10-50 fabric compositions. Shipped to my home in a week for just $100.
It was Peru where I got the garments manufactured. It did cost me about 20-30% more but it was very satisfactory.
Chinese manufacturers can do absolutely amazing work - provided you can get them to care. In general they'll manufacture exactly what you ask them to. They are also very happy to do manual labour to get the job done.
But for most stuff, don't expect too much feedback. Asking for feedback on a design to optimize it for production didn't really produce anything useful, and they manufactured designs which contained obvious mistakes.
This can be overcome. I know in the UK it was similar, 60s and 70s manufacturing quality was very poor. In the 80s factories started with quality management processes, 9001 etc and quality really dramatically improved.
>I never visited China & the manufacturing went perfect.
it's about the type of manufacturing that these groups are used for.
My father took his bicycle part manufacturing to China in the early 90s and had his IP and design-work ripped off and duplicated to the point of making his formerly successful business largely insolvent -- this taught him the value of keeping the assembly and finishing work in-house, but unfortunately that lesson came too late for his ventures.
Same story with an exercise equipment MFG that I did design work for more recently. The joke at the table was "OK, we can get the bulk manufactured for X in (Chinese province)... but how long until we see these for sale on Taobao?"
The work ethnic thing is a real shame because I've seen this reflected through the consultancies I deal with.
It is just unbothered with a lack of pride from an engineering and effort stand point. Important not to generalise as there are the odd shining examples that come through.
Similarly in medicine in India, not a single drug has been developed in India that has come to market though it is a manufacturing centre house for cheap generics, how safe they are I'm very unsure.
> not a single drug has been developed in India that has come to market
Not true.
<excerpt>
The first modern synthetic drug to be developed in India was Urea Stibamine in 1922 by UN Brahmachari against visceral leishmaniasis.3 Visceral leishmaniasis was a severe health burden during the early part of the 20th century, and it was a life saving drug for a large section of the population. Historically, it was the second drug developed against an infectious disease after Salversan (against Syphillis) and well before penicillin or sulfa drugs. It is still in use in many countries in a modified form.
...
In spite of many odds, Indian pharmaceutical and biotech companies have been able to pile up an impressive array of more than 120 new chemical entities (NCEs) currently progressing in various preclinical and clinical stages of developments. A few examples are given below. In June 2013, Zydus Cadila launched saroglitazar (Lipaglyn), the first glitazar in the world to be approved for the treatment of dyslipidemia or hypertriglyceridemia in patients with type 2 diabetes. The drug, a dual peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPAR) agonist, controls lipids by reducing triglycerides and LDL cholesterol and increasing HDL cholesterol. It also shows considerable reduction in fasting plasma glucose and glycosylated hemoglobin in a 4 mg daily dose. Earlier, in April 2012, Ranbaxy launched India’s first domestically developed antimalarial drug, Synriam. A fixed dose combination of arterolane with piperaquine, Synriam was developed as a simplified single-dose once-a-day therapy for 3 days for the treatment of acute, uncomplicated Plasmodium falciparum malaria in adults.
...
Twelve new drugs have gotten Drug Controller General (India) approval from CSIR-Central Drug Research Institute, Lucknow, that includes “Centchroman”, marketed as “Saheli”, a nonsteroidal oral contraceptive pill.7 A synthetic antimalarial molecule of the endoperoxide family 97/78 from this institute is currently undergoing phase I clinical trial. In the cardiovascular area, two synthetic molecules, S007-867 and S002-333, have been developed as potent inhibitors of collagen induced platelet adhesion and aggregation that can find therapeutic applications in patients of coronary artery disease and thrombotic cerebral stroke. CSIR-IIIM, Jammu, in partnership with Cadila Pharmaceuticals, has developed a new combination drug for TB in 2009, named Risorine.8 In CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Biology, Kolkata, an herbal formulation has been developed for the treatment of benign prostate hyperplasia9 and is currently being marketed under the brand name “Prostalyn”. Bacosides-enriched standardized extract of the herb Bacopa monnieri, commonly known as Brahmi, has been developed by CSIR-CDRI, Lucknow, to enhance memory and learning. The product that has been licensed to M/s Lumen Marketing Co., Chennai, is being sold under different brand names in different Asian and European countries. In the area of biologicals, CSIR-Institute of Microbial Technology, Chandigarh, developed recombinant streptokinase, a “smart” clot buster that has been licensed to Nostrum, a USA based company. The protein therapeutic is being progressed through the clinical phases in India.
</excerpt>
Reference:
Balganesh T, Kundu TK, Chakraborty TK, Roy S. Drug discovery research in India: current state and future prospects. ACS Med Chem Lett. 2014 May 23;5(7):724-6. doi: 10.1021/ml500183c. PMID: 25050153; PMCID: PMC4094254. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4094254/
Do you mean they lack the skills and don’t fully comprehend the requirements? How do you ship without doing QC and do you not implement a feedback system to identify the problematic source?
Isn't China known for crappy stuff like selling say, several tonnes of copper only to find out upon delivery that the purity is absolute shit?
My only personal experience with Chinese manufacturing is a company I worked for having a case for a product manufactured there, had our own industrial designer who came up with something beautiful, found a manufacturer and started getting sample cases in then eventually larger batches.
2 months later, we see our company's case listed all over Alibaba/Aliexpress.
Of course Apple gets good results from China, they have the $$$ to avoid the usual scams/corruption. But a smaller business/start-up will still be taken advantage of, imo.
And say you want to start a business there, doesn't Chinese law still stipulate that 51% of any business in China has to be owned by your Chinese partner? If I move to China right now and start a life there I don't believe I'd be allowed to start a business.
Anyone who's read outsourced code can vouch for the similar QC problems. I work with a lot of great Indian software developers; none of them worked IN India itself; they tend to be the ones that are skilled enough to quickly realize they're able to command massively higher wages by leaving India.
India, despite it's reputation as a software outsourcing location has never been able to produce exportable quality besides textiles. There are no cars or electronics, or chip fabs in this country.
The author's description of the government being 'bureaucratic' is a nice way of saying corrupt, and certainly has no direct bearing on manufacturing yields. That's simply the way business is done in a largely domestic economy.
The worst I could say about the India based teams I've worked with is that some were to-the-letter to a fault. Anything not explicitly stated was skipped, where you'd typically expect a dev to fill in the unstated but obvious things that you only discover while working a task.
But that was at Amazon. At my current gig, the India based teams are great. Not quite up to the standards of the US teams, but I'm sure they're more cost effective. They're also hungry for more interesting responsibilities, and are proactively improving things. It makes me think that Amazon just had shitty management over there.
I work at Mercedes-Benz. I'm not secret about it, I just don't feel as comfortable being noisy about current experiences with their name attached, as I do things from several years ago. I don't know that that's necessarily a logical reason to make a distinction.
India of late has a capricious regulation problem which makes it difficult for tech firms to have predictability.
And everyone already knows you can get decent quality manufacturing done in Vietnam. India would like to be considered in that same group.
Therefore it's in Apple's interest to present India with the opportunity to demonstrate that capability, while giving Apple a measure of leverage in cases where India's government is considering outlawing encryption or unmoderated forums or the shift key or whatever they think will make people stop complaining about them today.
Does everyone also know about the outsize influence China has on Vietnam? If the goal is to de-risk a China / US Trade War scenario and prevent Chinese government from stealing chip tech etc - then you dont get much by going to their pals next door ;)
I would strongly suggest not calling India's pharma industry a success. It is rife with terrible quality and government-sponsored coverups.
Here is one book that goes into some detail:Bottle of Lies: Ranbaxy and the Dark Side of Indian Pharma
Many children lost their lives in Gambia and Uzbekistan after consuming tainted cough syrup made in India. The worst part is not the error, it is the fact that indian regulators and the indian government don't do anything to solve the problem.
We're in Australia and after reading that book we'll go out of our way to not buy generics manufactured in India.
Weirdly, it doesn't seem like a regulatory requirement to print the country of manufacture on the box. All of our food is clearly labelled but not pharmaceuticals? An odd omission.
I speak as someone who worked in India -- Bangalore, in the IT sector -- for 2 years. I loved the place and the people. But for sure the work ethic is ... different to Australia.
the disappointing thing is that India can absolutely dominate the sector and supply cheap generics to poor countries. They have the expertise and supply chains. All while making a tidy profit.
Instead, greed and crony capitalism takes over and increasingly, the indian government is getting increasingly involved, reacting to any criticism in a churlish manner.
Really sad to see the wasted potential in a country like India. I suspect this is cultural and not easy to fix.
Weirdly, it doesn't seem like a regulatory requirement to print the country of manufacture on the box. All of our food is clearly labelled but not pharmaceuticals?
i am pretty sure that every few weeks I see floating up yet another article about some generic made in India recalled due to whatever reasons. So while they did capture a big market share, i think it's acknowledged that they have quality control issues
No. There have been years of serious quality problems at certain Indian manufacturers. Here's a case from 10 years ago:
During a visit to a facility of leading Indian drugmaker Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd last year, U.S. inspectors found that a black fiber embedded in a tablet may have been a hair from an employee’s arm, according to documents seen by Reuters. ....
The Mohali plant, in the northern state of Punjab, had not been making U.S. exports since last November, when it voluntarily recalled its generic version of cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor in the United States due to the potential presence of glass particles in certain batches.
Here's another case from last year:
A parliamentary committee in Gambia said on Tuesday that India-based drug maker Maiden Pharmaceuticals Ltd was responsible for the deaths of at least 70 children from acute kidney injury and called on the government to pursue legal action.
According to a WHO report, "labs contracted by it in Ghana and Switzerland found excess levels of ethyleneglycol and diethyleneglycol contaminants in the Maiden syrups."
This is ironic considering just this last month there was a controversy over their pharmaceutical standards with multiple children dying from over the counter medicine.
They haven’t done well and there’s constant issues with Indian “genetics” not actually delivering the amount of a given medicine claimed. There’s also almost no recourse one can take here.
They are engineered in the Uk. Engines made in Uk and China. From memory India was assembly from knockdown unless that has changed. Supply is for the domestic market. Just because there is Ownership doesn't mean transfer of skills
Hyundai does some design work in India and manufacturing (i20) but hardly any exported, and for the domestic market.
Mahindra is probably doing the most exports, at a guess
I do not have a Tata car, but its everywhere here in India. It gets the job done and it is reliable, cheap to service and maintain and has good fuel economy. They also have make so many heavy buses and trucks. Technology and reliability isn't an issue with them. The latest Tata cars score high in NCAP too. Only reason I don't like a Tata car is because they are not so great in styling their cars. If some of them have good front design, they look bad from the back. The one's that look nice from back or sides doesn't look so nice from in the front etc.
Only have good things to say about Tata Indica. My dad was a Cab driver. Indica's were big then. We had two cars, both crosses 2,00,000 kms. The last one not only crossed 2,00,000 kms, we still use it.
> At an iPhone casings factory in Hosur run by Indian conglomerate Tata, one of Apple’s suppliers, just about one out of every two components coming off the production line is in good enough shape to eventually be sent to Foxconn, Apple’s assembly partner for building iPhones, according to a person familiar with the matter.
You're right. Nonetheless, not quite at the level one might have hoped given the early promises they made years ago. They never did create the car of the future to sell to the Americans.
I say this as the whitest white man ever, so please correct me if I'm being discriminatory.
I understand it's also a culture issue. India has a culture of never telling clients "no" for anything, even if they know they can't do it. So you ask for something insanely complex, and your contractor in India will throw a mountain of buggy code at you. I wouldn't be surprise if that's also the issue here.
We had some Indian devs in a subsidiary for years, and that absolutely tracks.
Cross-cultural communication is an actual field of study, you know? But in this case, with the unwillingness to say "no", it's a killer. We ended up cutting them loose because even though they were cheaper per hour than US-based resources, we couldn't make the progress we needed to make. One US dev because 3, and that became a whole team, and that's how we decided to continue.
I've heard it as Asian cultures in general, being conformist. For example, I've heard the same from Japanese devs who have to save the face of their superiors, and in Chinese manufacturing as well.
Yeah my experience has been abysmal. Now I have met engineers in the states from India who were some of the most brilliant people I’ve met, but the companies I’ve been at that offshored drove me crazy. Time complexity and DRY were things these individuals had never considered worthy of their time. These weren’t all cheap hires either: some of them were senior engineers making six figures
I was at a company that moved from an offshored setup to an offshored and outsourced one, and that was eye opening.
The offshore employees were, on aggregate, no better or no worse than their US counterparts. They were carefully recruited by a dedicated team, and all ended up with solid institutional knowledge because they were valued and retained over their careers. They even had decent advancement paths as well, including into management - I remember one guy in the office whose reporting chain went from him to Hyderabad - USA - Bangalore - USA. That had to be fun.
But then the outsourcing bug bit, teams were decimated in both countries, and that’s when I got to see the typical horror stories firsthand.
I’m careful now to ask people who talk about “offshoring” if they mean building a team of FTEs in another country, or hiring a body shop with the lie that they’ll handle the “non-core business tasks”.
> There are no cars or electronics, or chip fabs in this country.
This is only partially true.
India has factories that provide inter-mediate parts required for creating final product. For example, a car needs axles, engine, dashboard plastics, alloy for body, brakes and electronics. You are more likely to find an Indian name in top-10 vendors for above parts sorted by marketshare. With the exception of engine, transmission, they have expanded.
What it does lack is tack of exporting finished products such as iPhone or smartphone or cars or jets.
And I think this will be a long process. Someone with deep pockets like Apple is willing to bet and here we are.
Indian made cars are exported to multiple countries (1). Exports are growing YoY. This is HN; when making blanket statements like these in the future, please provide a citation.
There are scams at every single level in the Indian system. Everybody wants a cut and some extra to do their job. It is maybe one of the worst places to manufacture in the world. I know Apple needs to diversify but Vietnam and other such countries might be a better fit. The work ethic is severely lacking in India.
Similar difficulties pervade the supply chain as it passes through India, where intermediates expect to 'take a taste' of the product's value. Just try to personally carry new electronics into the country without greasing a palm or two.
How does your personal experience with carrying new electronics into the country apply to broader supply chain difficulties? You don’t have to “grease a palm or two” to carry new electronics into the country if you are willing to pay the lawful customs duty / tax.
As you cast aspersions on others who might be corrupt, please think about your collusion / readiness to bribe and what that says about yourself.
If you are within customs rules, you don't have to pay anything. Else pay the right duty based on the original invoice you should be carrying with you. I have taken TVs, laptops, iPhones, game consoles and have never been bothered by customs.
I heard a story about a business that worked with a Chinese chip manufacturer once. They ordered 10,000 of a particular microprocessor and instructed the company that they would accept a maximum of 1 faulty chip in 250.
When the order arrived there were 10,000 chips, and an extra little bag with 40 more chips in it. The packing note said that they'd sent the faulty ones separately but weren't sure why they were needed.
It's likely apocryphal but having worked with some Chinese manufacturers I like to believe it.
My layperson's impression is that Apple has very demanding standards for iPhone manufacturing, and I had some questions:
* Do contracts like this provide good metrics for a manufacturing concern aspiring to that level of capability?
* How transferable are the capabilities needed to make an iPhone casing on-budget with low defect rate? For example, does it get you 1/4 of what you need to make a touchscreen (e.g., logistics management, worker process culture, leadership)?
A few years ago I watched an interview on youtube. Some CEO was describing doing business with India and China. Yes for China it was "can do, want to do, will do" attitude and he was generally happy. Indians - not that much. I will try to find the interview and post a link later. His description of doing business in India was a gem to watch
This is like comparing the code written by an experienced 20 year veteran to the code written by a fresh graduate. Give it time, India will catch up. Lot of people in the comments taking a dig at the work ethic of people in India when most of them will cry a river if asked by their employer to RTO 2 days a week.
Seriously, it has become a pattern now in every thread related to India. Really shows how HN techies are clueless about real world trends and live in their small bubbles.
Angela Saini in her book "Geek Nation: How Indian Science is Taking Over the World" bragged that India is a up and coming scientific superpower. That book was published a decade ago.
I don't think problems like this were unexpected, everyone knows India's manufacturing sector is less mature and not hyper-competitive like China's. Companies like Tata especially are going to be cautious to a fault about changing processes or spending a lot of money on improvements, because that attitude is what made them successful in India so far. The question is, will this new interest from Apple and others allow the country's electronics industry to grow and see the more capable businesses outcompete the rest?
This is an article that paraphrases another article from the Financial Times (https://archive.is/iuXAm) both of which lack any real sources or facts from Apple themselves. The only people quoted are a random Bain consultant and Vivek Wadhwa who basically shows up with an opinion whenever anyone says "India" - regardless of whether he actually understands the industry or not.
None of this is to say that the problems might not be real, but bear in mind that China literally started producing electronics in the 80s, a 40 year headstart. And even then, until the early 2000s even in India Chinese goods had the reputation of being low quality, and for good reason. It takes years of experience on multiple levels to achieve the level of production that Apple targets. But it's not unachievable, even in India.
The country has pulled this off in other sectors - IT, Aerospace, Automotives and Pharmaceuticals to name a few.
This is HN so the moment I say IT and India in the same sentence a megathread of outsourcing woes will start to form. But Tech in India is much more than outsourcing for the last 2 decades - solid tech companies serving global and local markets like Freshworks, Zomato, Zoho, BharatPe, RazorPay, Chargebee etc have emerged.
Apple is big enough and has sufficient resources to have known that manufacturing in India will have a learning curve. It's not like they sent a team of 5 engineers on a plane and told them to go get it built. Apple has been operating in the country for well over a decade now - it's only just starting to scale things up on the production side. This will also pass.
at this scale and complexity it's definitely one of the earlier projects. Apple does almost nothing "off the shelf" - tools, processes and often even materials are engineered to their specific needs. That's different from the more lego like manufacturing that most electronics require.
I think there's something challenging to put my finger on about India, which is something like:
"When you have an overall country atmosphere where you (even if you are conscientious and care) think others are not conscientious and do not care, then you will come to not be conscientious and care either."
So there is an effect where enough people disobey rules or lack standards, that eventually no one follows the rules. Traffic is ridiculous because no one obeys the rules, manufacturing is subpar because no one thinks anyone else will care (or will put up with shoddy deliveries).
And this is not some racist / cultural prejudice. It is totally changeable. The evidence I have here is that people from India, when living in the US, completely adapt and become "positive rule-wanting people". There is something about a critical mass of rule-breakers that sends a system into a negative spiral. As others said, probably China was like that too at some time in the recent past. And even the US was (or might become) this way.
The opposite effect is also in force: when you live in Japan, for example, even as a visitor, and see that no one is littering on the public streets, even when they do not provide trash cans, you don't litter either. But let a certain viral % of rule breakers take hold, and if your group culture does not value what is being broken, you can descend into a loss of discipline.
Again, this is not some prejudice -- it is a human factors / malleable / totally changeable thing. But it will take decades I think. And have lots of forces trying to stop it from improving. Sometimes I think you need to create an isolated bubble where enough people agree and see how it can work, to propagate it elsewhere. Otherwise the forces of mediocrity pull you back down into chaos.
> There is something about a critical mass of rule-breakers that sends a system into a negative spiral.
Yes this is classic game theory at play. And it’s true for all “low-trust” countries with shoddy rule of law. It doesn’t take decades to change behaviour though. I have seen first-hand traffic behaviour improving in my city when cameras were installed at every road intersection and fines were automatically sent to rule breakers.
Unsurprising for anyone that has done business in India. This is not a dig on Indian people, but the society they operate in is incredibly incredibly corrupt, on a scale which is basically unthinkable to anyone who hasn't been directly exposed to it. I cannot imagine doing business of the precision that Apple is trying to achieve in India. There are many other lower precision arrangements that can be worked out in India, but something like an iPhone seems impossible without a complete sea change in how Indian society operates at every level.
Anybody who has done business in India is never surprised by the number of spam, scam boiler rooms, and other nefarious global criminal organizations operating in India. It's all part of the same pervasive corruption within Indian society.
I had the same impressions of China 30 years ago too.
Isn’t doing this kind of thing how you start to reform things at least on the business levels?
Apple will absolutely get its way even against the Indian government. And if they really can’t they’ll abandon the country which would absolutely have a huge negative impact on Indias economy.
> Isn’t doing this kind of thing how you start to reform things at least on the business levels?
Yes, absolutely. It's a slow, difficult path, however. Without the right incentive structures, there's no reason for a society to change to avoid corruption.
As the saying goes, Americas worst ideas are always bipartisan. The whole decoupling from China hysteria is going to cause significant harm to consumers and people vastly underestimate how complex manufacturing at the scale, quality, and price is that China built out over the years. There's an incredible amount of tacit knowledge in industrial processes that cannot easily be replicated, it takes a long time to develop.
Indians software programmers are just as shoddy. The only difference is that it is much harder to see software quality than hardware quality. In hardware you can easily spot the quality by looking at the fit and finish and whether things fit together nicely. In software it's just code and the quality only manifest itself in buggy and hard to maintain software, which can be years later.
194 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadBut I guess the answer right now is ultimately China.
I wonder how a war over Taiwan would impact that time table? My guess is that it would slow it even further. India has to know it’s holding all the cards.
There won't be any war if China invades Taiwan, merely devastating impact.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/02/apple-chipmaker-tsmc-warns-t...[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/taiwan-signals-its-chip-f...
People tend to drastically underestimate the both the scale and sophistication of manufacturing in China.
For certain products the only reasonable alternatives to China are going to be South Korea and Japan in the medium term as they are the only other hubs with the required sophistication in electronics, batteries, etc.
However you will need to pay a significant premium over China and probably still face lower yields and end up sending said parts somewhere else for final assembly etc.
Indeed.
And stats like that does make you kind of worry about pharmaceuticals where India is something like number two worldwide as supplier of APIs to the global Pharma industry.
API = Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient, or typically described as "active ingredient" on the labelling of the pills you take.
Disclaimer: I'm not making claims or insinuations here, I've insufficient knowledge of Pharma to do so. I said "makes you think" for a reason, i.e. pure speculation, probably wrong.
But to really understand what 50% means in the context of Apple, it would be interesting to see how long it took China to achieve such great numbers in tech manufacturing, and even seeing how long it took India to become acceptable to pharma QA standards
I don’t accept this disclaimer. “makes you …” is not a phrase people use when they’re trying to avoid implications or insinuations. the opposite, in fact, so much so that I’d say that it’s probably as often used seriously as it is humorously to mock conspiracy types who might structure an argument like that.
Disclaimer: I’m not suggesting that you’re making a conspiracy theory, or that I even disagree with your comment, just that the disclaimer doesn’t hold water
Get lost.
My disclaimer was written as is and means exactly what it says, i.e. making clear it was pure speculation and that I knew nothing of the Pharma industry.
In other words, I was openly inviting people to dismiss the comment as worthless.
There is no reading between the lines to be done.
can you see how this works from my reply to your comment? I spent the whole comment slating what you said, then stuck in a disclaimer at the end to point out that I don't really disagree with what you said, nor do I intend to insult you, and yet you still got emotional about it. disclaimers like that are lazy and don't change the fact that you said something. why not just put the same extra effort into making your words more clear?
I got a handful of absolutely impeccable prototypes from my Chinese manufacturers, for about 350 USD a piece. The few UK machine shops that even bothered answering my emails and phonecalls quoted about 10-15k per unit.
We are investing into a drug development project, and had to choose a clinical trial partner. A small no-name European CRO quoted us ~$40 million. An established Indian company with a track record of launching FDA approved products in the US market quoted us $4 million. And they were supposed to be the "marquee" option.
Sounds familiar. Just getting someone local to take your money is like pulling teeth sometimes. Eventually went with someone halfway across the the country mostly because they actually bothered to reply at all.
Given how much is available and how cheap it is, it's crazy to do things like ban on-shore wind.
As a client, I do notice communication is lacking when dealing with western manufacturers. Many act like they simply dont care about your business.
Also how little tech workers in India care about what they do.
This isn't a racial observation - Indians outside India are just as conscientious as Asians or Europeans are and are not included in this observation. Rather it's a cultural observation that's probably come about as a result of the outsourcing culture and lack of advancement opportunities that comes along with it.
Are you trying to say the Indian tech workers have much more adult attitude to their employment, as opposed to their western friends who are happy to sacrifice themselves ad maiorem corpo gloriam?
You are right.
Increased demand stress is part of the filtering process that will expose the brilliant domestic Indian engineers capable of running these operations to international buyers.
Paraphrased it went something like "we could fit all experts in $hardware_field in this conference room, but in China we can't fit them in a stadium".
The scale at which China has built up an educated work force is at a staggering scale.
The eastern giant we have burdened with our manufacturing processes, logistics, etc has encoded these processes into their identity and are now the experts. Is this bad? Does it HAVE to influence geo-politics so greatly? Can't we all just get along?
I think about this often.
There will be growing pains moving and scaling manufacturing anywhere. The fact that there are early obstacles and hurdles does not mean we should simply throw up our hands and say "whelp, looks like China is the only option, we have no choice but to stick there!".
Apple is developing manufacturing infrastructure to derisk their supply chain. Because they have 50% rejection rates for iPhone casings at one particular manufacturing facility in India does not really imply anything other than teething issues with scaling up.
The original Financial Times original this blog post is based on fleshes out the issues and obstacles in greater depth IMO and is worth a read:
https://www.ft.com/content/0d70a823-0fba-49ae-a453-2518afcb0...
Appeal to authority is just speculation at the end of the day. It's just as possible a brilliant CEO with tons of supply chain experience made a mistake or was forced into a bad decision.
>The fact that there are early obstacles and hurdles does not mean we should simply throw up our hands and say "whelp, looks like China is the only option, we have no choice but to stick there!".
Is anyone saying that?
>Because they have 50% rejection rates for iPhone casings at one particular manufacturing facility in India does not really imply anything other than teething issues with scaling up.
It does imply at the least that the processes Apple has used in other regions doesn't translate quickly. There are definitely additional questions raised. Is this a labor quality control issue? Procurement? Worse vendors? Or as you speculate, this is all part of the start-up process.
Honestly, yeah. Doubling down on China was a mistake, and now there are no easy outs for the hardware side of things. Apple tried manufacturing the Mac Pro in the US, but I doubt the numbers on that added up in the US' favor.
Correcting course is the right move to make now, but people were right when they called Apple's Chinese supply chain a deal with the devil. Now the devil has come to take their dues, and the first world is scrambling to make sense of it all.
I'm tired of this "4D chess" mindset around Chinese manufacturing. It's bad for everyone but the Chinese government, and you can't pretend like it's a sustainable mindset. Supporting the systematic oppression, sterilization and execution of entire ethnic groups is not worth a new iPhone next year.
Have you confused me with someone else?
You should probably clarify it on your about page lest other folks think it's meant to be a joke account.
The former seems like it will give people an excuse to not take you seriously. I'm not entirely convinced this isn't an elaborate joke.
I doubt Apple is underestimating it. Shenzhen wasn't built in a day. They will need to get their reps in before they can start down the path to match China on quality. Apple probably figures it's worth the up front cost to harden against geopolitical risk.
I can't imagine how a bureaucratic government could be the cause of a 50% failure rate for these components. More likely apathetic attitudes is the cause of both.
Q1: Is Apple QCing everything before shipping to assembly?
Q2: Surely quality issues should be the supplier's problem, not [just] Apple's, and hence a zero defects target should be the supplier's goal, not [just] Apple's?
Maybe they (seemingly justifiably) had sufficient upfront concerns about quality that they are sampling at a much higher rate than they would normally.
This is all fairly normal for large scale manufacturing in my experience.
You want everything to meet spec, but the spec won't cover everything, and especially at the beginning the supplier may or may not even be able to meet spec in volume.
Indeed.
So why does the original article claim that the "problem" is due to differing attitudes of Indian vs Chinese suppliers?
EDIT: Wouldn't the "problem" likely also occur if you were to switch from one Chinese supplier to another [completely unrelated] Chinese supplier?
https://www.ft.com/content/0d70a823-0fba-49ae-a453-2518afcb0...
> Operations in India are not running at that sort of pace, said a former Apple engineer briefed on the matter: “There just isn’t a sense of urgency.”
> In China, suppliers and government officials took a “whatever it takes” approach to win iPhone orders. Former Apple employees describe instances in which they would estimate a certain task might take several weeks, only to show up the next morning to find it already completed at inexplicable speed.
> Operations in India are not running at that sort of pace, said a former Apple engineer briefed on the matter: “There just isn’t a sense of urgency.”
In India, most manufacturing companies or businesses are trying to sell what they have or can produce (without any attention to detail). As a result, false promises & contracts are prevalent. There are no SOP's or any organized sampling process in most Indian companies vs Chinese who keep everything very formal & organized.
I never visited China & the manufacturing went perfect. In India, I personally visited the factories & still could not get the job done. All samples were rejected. Lost money & most importantly time. It's a damn mess. People seriously lack work ethic.
95 percent of the shops I have known in the past or worked with currently would sell you their ability to do something while simultaneous upgrading their equipment to match the moment the PO is signed off on.
If fab/machine/mfg shops didn't take on work that was beyond their capability then the smaller groups would starve to death immediately, being unable to use the larger contracts to facilitate upgrades.
The trick is to find a shop operator that is aware of their rate of capability upgrade and turn-around time, that way the delivery dates aren't inaccurate even if the shop capabilities need to be 'tuned' (new machines bought).
In those lines of work where it's especially common, ethical behavior can be a competitive advantage
You may want to check with Ea-Nasir about his copper ingots... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir
What’s your point?
No idea where “half the economies of countries” is coming from? Citation needed..
Hopefully India's government doesn't follow in their footsteps, Apple's Chinese manufacturers have a spotty track record vis-a-vis exploiting executive power.
I would not be too negative on India. I don't see a reason why things won't improve with enough time and motivation.
Society remains deeply segregated with the caste system being a drag on everything. Religious intelorance is very high and the policians in power seem all to happy to stroke the flame of islamophabia rather than work on solving the actual country problems. Corruption is a reality everywhere and at all levels.
Idea is to produce whatever crap you can initially just to get started. Eventually you’ll get better. China is in middle of this cycle.
Just because your job description calls you a software engineer instead of software developer doesn't make you an engineer in the traditional sense. It's as much value as your job calling you a "senior" after 3 years of experience just to pay you less. As long as your titles aren't transferable between jobs, then they're not real titles.
So I don't get why people argue about these titles. Software engineering is often just overrated digital plumbing work anyway.
To me engineering means doing more safety critical work, similar to designing and building bridges, where people's lives are also on the line, so valid credentials and titles from accredited bodies matter.
What do you think is the difference between dev and engineer then?
I personally don't care about titles or credentials in this racket. Call me a dev, call me an engineer, you can even call ma a clown, i don't care as long as you pay me what I ask.
This varies massively from one CM to the next.
If you can get your foot in the door at the higher tier CMs, the professionalism and attention to detail will be exactly as you described. If you can get in contact with an ambitious smaller CM looking to grow with you (their customer), you can also find great attention to detail.
OTOH, some of the smaller CMs in China will gladly tell you whatever you need to hear in order to send the wire transfer, then you'll get back whatever they feel like delivering. That is if you don't get bumped by a higher paying customer taking your spot on their schedule. You might also get great first articles and have great success on the first prototype run, but then they'll take the A team off of your line and have the night shift run it next time with much less attention to detail.
INDIA - Met at least 12-15 manufactures in India (medium to large scale, $1m ARR to $50m ARR). Only a 1-2 of these had any catalogs or samples of different fabric compositions. Most wanted an advance to kick-start the process. Sampling was a total failure with three of these.
CHINA - Contacted about 10 manufactures in China via Alibaba. Each one of them had a very detailed catalog of anywhere in between 10-50 fabric compositions. Shipped to my home in a week for just $100.
It was Peru where I got the garments manufactured. It did cost me about 20-30% more but it was very satisfactory.
Chinese manufacturers can do absolutely amazing work - provided you can get them to care. In general they'll manufacture exactly what you ask them to. They are also very happy to do manual labour to get the job done.
But for most stuff, don't expect too much feedback. Asking for feedback on a design to optimize it for production didn't really produce anything useful, and they manufactured designs which contained obvious mistakes.
In general, you simply get what you pay for!
it's about the type of manufacturing that these groups are used for.
My father took his bicycle part manufacturing to China in the early 90s and had his IP and design-work ripped off and duplicated to the point of making his formerly successful business largely insolvent -- this taught him the value of keeping the assembly and finishing work in-house, but unfortunately that lesson came too late for his ventures.
Same story with an exercise equipment MFG that I did design work for more recently. The joke at the table was "OK, we can get the bulk manufactured for X in (Chinese province)... but how long until we see these for sale on Taobao?"
It is just unbothered with a lack of pride from an engineering and effort stand point. Important not to generalise as there are the odd shining examples that come through.
Similarly in medicine in India, not a single drug has been developed in India that has come to market though it is a manufacturing centre house for cheap generics, how safe they are I'm very unsure.
Not true.
<excerpt> The first modern synthetic drug to be developed in India was Urea Stibamine in 1922 by UN Brahmachari against visceral leishmaniasis.3 Visceral leishmaniasis was a severe health burden during the early part of the 20th century, and it was a life saving drug for a large section of the population. Historically, it was the second drug developed against an infectious disease after Salversan (against Syphillis) and well before penicillin or sulfa drugs. It is still in use in many countries in a modified form.
...
In spite of many odds, Indian pharmaceutical and biotech companies have been able to pile up an impressive array of more than 120 new chemical entities (NCEs) currently progressing in various preclinical and clinical stages of developments. A few examples are given below. In June 2013, Zydus Cadila launched saroglitazar (Lipaglyn), the first glitazar in the world to be approved for the treatment of dyslipidemia or hypertriglyceridemia in patients with type 2 diabetes. The drug, a dual peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPAR) agonist, controls lipids by reducing triglycerides and LDL cholesterol and increasing HDL cholesterol. It also shows considerable reduction in fasting plasma glucose and glycosylated hemoglobin in a 4 mg daily dose. Earlier, in April 2012, Ranbaxy launched India’s first domestically developed antimalarial drug, Synriam. A fixed dose combination of arterolane with piperaquine, Synriam was developed as a simplified single-dose once-a-day therapy for 3 days for the treatment of acute, uncomplicated Plasmodium falciparum malaria in adults.
...
Twelve new drugs have gotten Drug Controller General (India) approval from CSIR-Central Drug Research Institute, Lucknow, that includes “Centchroman”, marketed as “Saheli”, a nonsteroidal oral contraceptive pill.7 A synthetic antimalarial molecule of the endoperoxide family 97/78 from this institute is currently undergoing phase I clinical trial. In the cardiovascular area, two synthetic molecules, S007-867 and S002-333, have been developed as potent inhibitors of collagen induced platelet adhesion and aggregation that can find therapeutic applications in patients of coronary artery disease and thrombotic cerebral stroke. CSIR-IIIM, Jammu, in partnership with Cadila Pharmaceuticals, has developed a new combination drug for TB in 2009, named Risorine.8 In CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Biology, Kolkata, an herbal formulation has been developed for the treatment of benign prostate hyperplasia9 and is currently being marketed under the brand name “Prostalyn”. Bacosides-enriched standardized extract of the herb Bacopa monnieri, commonly known as Brahmi, has been developed by CSIR-CDRI, Lucknow, to enhance memory and learning. The product that has been licensed to M/s Lumen Marketing Co., Chennai, is being sold under different brand names in different Asian and European countries. In the area of biologicals, CSIR-Institute of Microbial Technology, Chandigarh, developed recombinant streptokinase, a “smart” clot buster that has been licensed to Nostrum, a USA based company. The protein therapeutic is being progressed through the clinical phases in India. </excerpt>
Reference:
Balganesh T, Kundu TK, Chakraborty TK, Roy S. Drug discovery research in India: current state and future prospects. ACS Med Chem Lett. 2014 May 23;5(7):724-6. doi: 10.1021/ml500183c. PMID: 25050153; PMCID: PMC4094254. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4094254/
My only personal experience with Chinese manufacturing is a company I worked for having a case for a product manufactured there, had our own industrial designer who came up with something beautiful, found a manufacturer and started getting sample cases in then eventually larger batches.
2 months later, we see our company's case listed all over Alibaba/Aliexpress.
Of course Apple gets good results from China, they have the $$$ to avoid the usual scams/corruption. But a smaller business/start-up will still be taken advantage of, imo.
And say you want to start a business there, doesn't Chinese law still stipulate that 51% of any business in China has to be owned by your Chinese partner? If I move to China right now and start a life there I don't believe I'd be allowed to start a business.
India, despite it's reputation as a software outsourcing location has never been able to produce exportable quality besides textiles. There are no cars or electronics, or chip fabs in this country.
The author's description of the government being 'bureaucratic' is a nice way of saying corrupt, and certainly has no direct bearing on manufacturing yields. That's simply the way business is done in a largely domestic economy.
I'm honestly surprised that Apple didn't choose Vietnam or Indonesia over India.
But that was at Amazon. At my current gig, the India based teams are great. Not quite up to the standards of the US teams, but I'm sure they're more cost effective. They're also hungry for more interesting responsibilities, and are proactively improving things. It makes me think that Amazon just had shitty management over there.
There are some Apple products already being made in Vietnam. I believe that some iPhone work is going there soon, as well.
India of late has a capricious regulation problem which makes it difficult for tech firms to have predictability.
And everyone already knows you can get decent quality manufacturing done in Vietnam. India would like to be considered in that same group.
Therefore it's in Apple's interest to present India with the opportunity to demonstrate that capability, while giving Apple a measure of leverage in cases where India's government is considering outlawing encryption or unmoderated forums or the shift key or whatever they think will make people stop complaining about them today.
https://www.investopedia.com/apple-moves-production-vietnam-...
I imagine once Apple is confident they will likely add more products there.
Here is one book that goes into some detail:Bottle of Lies: Ranbaxy and the Dark Side of Indian Pharma
Many children lost their lives in Gambia and Uzbekistan after consuming tainted cough syrup made in India. The worst part is not the error, it is the fact that indian regulators and the indian government don't do anything to solve the problem.
Weirdly, it doesn't seem like a regulatory requirement to print the country of manufacture on the box. All of our food is clearly labelled but not pharmaceuticals? An odd omission.
I speak as someone who worked in India -- Bangalore, in the IT sector -- for 2 years. I loved the place and the people. But for sure the work ethic is ... different to Australia.
Instead, greed and crony capitalism takes over and increasingly, the indian government is getting increasingly involved, reacting to any criticism in a churlish manner.
Really sad to see the wasted potential in a country like India. I suspect this is cultural and not easy to fix.
That might not be palatable but it's true.
My mate Kiran used to lament the state of his own country. "The corruption..." he would sigh.
It's the opposite in the US, for the most part.
During a visit to a facility of leading Indian drugmaker Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd last year, U.S. inspectors found that a black fiber embedded in a tablet may have been a hair from an employee’s arm, according to documents seen by Reuters. ....
The Mohali plant, in the northern state of Punjab, had not been making U.S. exports since last November, when it voluntarily recalled its generic version of cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor in the United States due to the potential presence of glass particles in certain batches.
Here's another case from last year:
A parliamentary committee in Gambia said on Tuesday that India-based drug maker Maiden Pharmaceuticals Ltd was responsible for the deaths of at least 70 children from acute kidney injury and called on the government to pursue legal action.
According to a WHO report, "labs contracted by it in Ghana and Switzerland found excess levels of ethyleneglycol and diethyleneglycol contaminants in the Maiden syrups."
https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/gambia-lawmakers-say-ma...
Note that the plant cited in the 2013 case was majority owned by a Japanese pharmaceutical company. They still couldn't get QC right.
That said, India does produce massive amounts of pharma for export around the world. Just read the labels on the boxes in the drug stores.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Motors
Not exported outside the middle east and India.
Looks like they sold 5 of them in Europe in 2016.
https://carsalesbase.com/europe-tata/#:~:text=Tata%20cars%20....
Hyundai does some design work in India and manufacturing (i20) but hardly any exported, and for the domestic market.
Mahindra is probably doing the most exports, at a guess
Very durable and value for money.
> At an iPhone casings factory in Hosur run by Indian conglomerate Tata, one of Apple’s suppliers, just about one out of every two components coming off the production line is in good enough shape to eventually be sent to Foxconn, Apple’s assembly partner for building iPhones, according to a person familiar with the matter.
It's precisely a software outsourcing location because they are unable to produce anything of value by themselves.
I understand it's also a culture issue. India has a culture of never telling clients "no" for anything, even if they know they can't do it. So you ask for something insanely complex, and your contractor in India will throw a mountain of buggy code at you. I wouldn't be surprise if that's also the issue here.
Cross-cultural communication is an actual field of study, you know? But in this case, with the unwillingness to say "no", it's a killer. We ended up cutting them loose because even though they were cheaper per hour than US-based resources, we couldn't make the progress we needed to make. One US dev because 3, and that became a whole team, and that's how we decided to continue.
I'm not sure the code shipped by the offshored programmers I've interacted with built 50% of the time.
Something like 90% of "software engineers" in the country are considered unfit for software engineering [0] [1]
[0] https://restofworld.org/2020/india-engineering-degree/
[1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/jobs/only-6-of-those-pa...
The offshore employees were, on aggregate, no better or no worse than their US counterparts. They were carefully recruited by a dedicated team, and all ended up with solid institutional knowledge because they were valued and retained over their careers. They even had decent advancement paths as well, including into management - I remember one guy in the office whose reporting chain went from him to Hyderabad - USA - Bangalore - USA. That had to be fun.
But then the outsourcing bug bit, teams were decimated in both countries, and that’s when I got to see the typical horror stories firsthand.
I’m careful now to ask people who talk about “offshoring” if they mean building a team of FTEs in another country, or hiring a body shop with the lie that they’ll handle the “non-core business tasks”.
This is only partially true.
India has factories that provide inter-mediate parts required for creating final product. For example, a car needs axles, engine, dashboard plastics, alloy for body, brakes and electronics. You are more likely to find an Indian name in top-10 vendors for above parts sorted by marketshare. With the exception of engine, transmission, they have expanded.
What it does lack is tack of exporting finished products such as iPhone or smartphone or cars or jets. And I think this will be a long process. Someone with deep pockets like Apple is willing to bet and here we are.
Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharat_Forge
1. https://wap.business-standard.com/article/companies/pv-expor...
Also wrong on chip fabs, there are no commercial high scales fabs but govt owned or small scale ones.
As you cast aspersions on others who might be corrupt, please think about your collusion / readiness to bribe and what that says about yourself.
When the order arrived there were 10,000 chips, and an extra little bag with 40 more chips in it. The packing note said that they'd sent the faulty ones separately but weren't sure why they were needed.
It's likely apocryphal but having worked with some Chinese manufacturers I like to believe it.
* Do contracts like this provide good metrics for a manufacturing concern aspiring to that level of capability?
* How transferable are the capabilities needed to make an iPhone casing on-budget with low defect rate? For example, does it get you 1/4 of what you need to make a touchscreen (e.g., logistics management, worker process culture, leadership)?
Reminds me of my experience at companies with outsourced IT support.
Apple won’t accept any other outcomes. And they have the leeway to abandon projects this size easily.
And if they don’t; it would be very damaging to India’s reputation (and GDP) for decades. I feel like they’ll figure out how to make it happen.
Not at all Apple. Move to Vietnam and you can duplicate the success you have in China. Indians are only good at talking a good talk.
Citation needed.
None of this is to say that the problems might not be real, but bear in mind that China literally started producing electronics in the 80s, a 40 year headstart. And even then, until the early 2000s even in India Chinese goods had the reputation of being low quality, and for good reason. It takes years of experience on multiple levels to achieve the level of production that Apple targets. But it's not unachievable, even in India.
The country has pulled this off in other sectors - IT, Aerospace, Automotives and Pharmaceuticals to name a few.
This is HN so the moment I say IT and India in the same sentence a megathread of outsourcing woes will start to form. But Tech in India is much more than outsourcing for the last 2 decades - solid tech companies serving global and local markets like Freshworks, Zomato, Zoho, BharatPe, RazorPay, Chargebee etc have emerged.
Apple is big enough and has sufficient resources to have known that manufacturing in India will have a learning curve. It's not like they sent a team of 5 engineers on a plane and told them to go get it built. Apple has been operating in the country for well over a decade now - it's only just starting to scale things up on the production side. This will also pass.
Pretty sure Indian electronic manufacturing didn't start with this Apple project.
"When you have an overall country atmosphere where you (even if you are conscientious and care) think others are not conscientious and do not care, then you will come to not be conscientious and care either."
So there is an effect where enough people disobey rules or lack standards, that eventually no one follows the rules. Traffic is ridiculous because no one obeys the rules, manufacturing is subpar because no one thinks anyone else will care (or will put up with shoddy deliveries).
And this is not some racist / cultural prejudice. It is totally changeable. The evidence I have here is that people from India, when living in the US, completely adapt and become "positive rule-wanting people". There is something about a critical mass of rule-breakers that sends a system into a negative spiral. As others said, probably China was like that too at some time in the recent past. And even the US was (or might become) this way.
The opposite effect is also in force: when you live in Japan, for example, even as a visitor, and see that no one is littering on the public streets, even when they do not provide trash cans, you don't litter either. But let a certain viral % of rule breakers take hold, and if your group culture does not value what is being broken, you can descend into a loss of discipline.
Again, this is not some prejudice -- it is a human factors / malleable / totally changeable thing. But it will take decades I think. And have lots of forces trying to stop it from improving. Sometimes I think you need to create an isolated bubble where enough people agree and see how it can work, to propagate it elsewhere. Otherwise the forces of mediocrity pull you back down into chaos.
Yes this is classic game theory at play. And it’s true for all “low-trust” countries with shoddy rule of law. It doesn’t take decades to change behaviour though. I have seen first-hand traffic behaviour improving in my city when cameras were installed at every road intersection and fines were automatically sent to rule breakers.
Anybody who has done business in India is never surprised by the number of spam, scam boiler rooms, and other nefarious global criminal organizations operating in India. It's all part of the same pervasive corruption within Indian society.
Isn’t doing this kind of thing how you start to reform things at least on the business levels?
Apple will absolutely get its way even against the Indian government. And if they really can’t they’ll abandon the country which would absolutely have a huge negative impact on Indias economy.
Yes, absolutely. It's a slow, difficult path, however. Without the right incentive structures, there's no reason for a society to change to avoid corruption.