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Comment by mikeg8 | Hacker News Reader

I think you missed the first point... the other comment never states that only Chinese firms can serve Chinese customers at all. He/she was more in agreeance with your point about chinese firms not needing to operate outside of china because their domestic market is large enough to serve their needs. Why leave when you have a 1bn+ person market in front of you?

I don't think chinese firms can't get a foothold abroad (see Huawei), it's just that they have less desire to.

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he said 'nobody else is going to come in and take those customers except Chinese companies'

And he's not far off... Yum is even spinning off its Chinese operations into a separate company that will reside entirely in China.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/yum-brands-to-spin-off-china-bus...

Apple is the biggest success story, but that could change literally overnight. It's a big risk to have large foreign operations in China.

The Chinese government couldn't cut off Apple at this point. The middle class are too bought in as users/owners, the rich make too much money from being suppliers, too many poor people have jobs depending on being Apple suppliers.

They would have massive civil unrest.

Massive civil unrest because Apple is kicked out of China? Ummm, there wouldn't be massive civil unrest in Palo Alto if Apple was kicked out town. People buying Apple products just don't do massive civil unrest. They'd bitch on Twitter (or Weibo/etc), but riots in the streets because you can't buy an iPhone? I'm as big an Apple fan as the next guy, but that just isn't credible.

I imagine most of occupy movement protesters were iphone demographics? Same for russian winter protests, same for ukrainian revolution.

> I don't think chinese firms can't get a foothold abroad (see Huawei), it's just that they have less desire to.

They not only have a desire but they also can get a foothold (look at how well many of their cheap phone brands are doing in developing countries). However, they do have a limited ability to do so when it comes to developed countries. Which isn't that bad since most of the big brands are manufactured inside their borders anyways. The calculus looks better for them than for, say, the UK.

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