Hacker News Reader

Comment by tooltalk | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to know who those 9,000 American suppliers and manufacturers are. Other than Corning who supplies the Gorilla Glasses for almost all smartphone makers, I can't really name any significant domestic suppliers who would make up $55B of their "spending."

View on HN

At least three of them will be supplying toilet paper. That leaves only 8997 left to account for..

Basically Apple just did a COUNT(*) query on their vendor table WHERE country IS 'USA'.

They don't mention if they are counting software vendors in this list as well. If so, it's pretty easy to hit that number. An employee wants a license for a drawing app? That company is now a "supplier".

Sometimes, it might be robotics companies whose products Apple uses to test their devices. You can't really name them because maybe you're not the target market for those products.

A supplier is also the company delivering fruit for offices or cleaning utensils.

They're building domestic datacenters, not iPhone factories.

Apple wants to create competition for the components they need to drive down prices throughout the supply chain. Most of their investments relate to this from camera tech to oled screens.

i expect intel gets a little bit of apple money. couple of bucks surely go micron's direction.

I'm guessing they are also counting suppliers for their infrastructure. So they are counting it when they buy 2x4s for a corporate office from a US wood supplier.

Technically, the structural components for an Apple corporate office are likely to also come from Corning.

Cleaners, security, (occasional) catering, office supplies for their retail stores in 45 states.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com