They must put the capital to work in building the replacement for Shenzhen/Guangdong or they’re going to fall as soon as investors realize the risk of them being subject to “sudden death.” (This is not the same thing as the 40 years of doom that were predicted for them.) How realistic is it that America allows Apple to continue sourcing there while it is assisting the people of Taiwan in their evacuation? At the same time, China may disrupt Apple supply once it finds Apple is financing the obsolescence of its tech zone, though they risk a lot of civil unrest if they do. Likewise, Apple probably needs some assurances that if they yield that supply chain, the vacuum will not be filled by competitors —meaning new Western regulation and whatever infrastructure they contribute to will be held in common and accessible to competitors according to investment (which is also not ideal for Apple domination, but the alternative is continued shadow of sudden death due to politics/regulation). In any case, it’s no longer an appropriate investment for many of the funds holding it.
Cook came from a PC maker. The game played against Apple for decades prior to that point was Microsoft racing all of the PC makers in China against Apple. So to prevent Google from doing that with iPad and iPhone, Cook bought up all the manufacturing capacity in China, leaving virtually none for Android (or Windows Mobile or WebOS) devices. To navigate out of China politics, the “mastermind” now has to do something that would have been ridiculous to an earlier version of himself —recreate that capacity elsewhere. Better this way, as Microsoft, Google and Amazon are all large enough to do it themselves now (and shut Apple out again, especially if China is taken away from them by the government).
It wasn't so long ago that these companies were the most valuable in the world at a market cap of $2-400 billion. They grew an order of magnitude in a decade.
Meanwhile the people who are making iPhone are working in abhorrent conditions. [1] Apple has huge margins and is hording ridiculous amounts of cash. There is zero reasons for this. Shame on all of us for letting this go on.
I mean while not great, Apple does seem to be the only company that audits its suppliers for such things. It's dropped suppliers for repeated infractions.
I think a key issue here is making it about Apple gets press. It doesn't matter if others are worse, articles about them don't get press.
I mean this is how it's reported. I've seen reports talking about poor working conditions at these factories. Sourced from ... Apple's own audits, in which they detail the fixes they required.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/apple-is-the...
Seems Saudi Aramco beat them to it for the 1st $2T company in 2019:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/12/investing/saudi-aramco-2-tril...