Is it some kind of monarchy?
PS. It's not the largest. Neither by market cap nor by employee number.
Bueno de Mesquita makes a compelling case for modeling most corporations as dictatorships in The Dictator's Handbook. So as long as succession is planned at the Corp, then yes, I suppose monar hy would be the correct model.
Apple scale is hundreds of millions of devices sold per year. Nobody said it was a “special” scale only for Apple.
At the topic of size: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20309140
Which is a point, even if it’s not substantiated. Even if it’s not true it’s a reasonable claim to reply with.
Your question is a problem because it’s a fake-innocent question, with a veiled accusation of Apple being a special case. You’re not engaging with whether Apple could move often, or does or doesn’t look at the long term, or is too big to ignore the long term, instead you’ve taken a straw man “Apple is special” - which was never claimed - and not even argued that either way, just tried to set some trap for the unwary.
Maybe rossdavidh's comment was reasonable in general. But with Apple you have a long term CEO under essentially no pressure for succession. You have product cycles that are going to push two years. You have supply chains that are going to involve dozens or more firms. You have a premium luxury brand. There is so much working against the idea that Apple, specifically, is make short term decisions at the expense of the long term. Still, Apple is not special, per se. It's executing astonishingly well, but I'd expect other capex heavy companies (auto manufacturing, vertically integrated oil e&p, and other hardware-weighted electronics, among others) to approach similar classes of decisions with similar care.
Part of the reason I regret engaging is because this thread is pretty far off topic. This is a low volume product and it's going to an existing partner. It's a minor decision and say nothing about stability in the US or China. The only reason it's getting coverage is because it moves their only US manufacturing to Taiwan or Shanghai.
edit: rossdavidh - I think we're wading a bit too far into hypotheticals. Moving Mac Pro production to Quanex closer to their existing supply chain is not an example of the behavior you described (but I won't deny happens)
Again, I'm not saying Tim Cook's in danger. But, if Steve Jobs can get fired from Apple, and several CEOs have, I don't know why we would expect that he is immune if Apple stops being profitable. Which, granted, it shows no signs of.
I don't know that you could say Apple is based anywhere. Their offices are in the US, they have finances in Ireland (I think?), and their production is in China. They just put stuff where it's cheapest and drawdown is minimized in the event of a catastrophe. It's all thought out, I'm sure.
What's ironic is that only a week ago reports were that Apple is looking to move production /out/ of China (which is mentioned in the article): https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-examines-feasibility-of-s...
For Mr. Cook, the focus on Asia “came down to two things,” said one former high-ranking Apple executive. Factories in Asia “can scale up and down faster” and “Asian supply chains have surpassed what’s in the U.S.” The result is that “we can’t compete at this point,” the executive said.
“The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”
So, from what I've read, there is also the huge factor of being able to easily source parts, much easier than in the US, and also much easier to change a factory.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-an...
I also remember Apple talking about expertise. The number of people experienced in running a large factory exist in the US, but at a much smaller number. Which means they're harder to hire and likely warrant a higher salary.
I also think people greatly over emphasize the role of assembly. I believe it's less than 10% of the cost of each phone. But, in light of all that, it was good to see attempts to onshore more of the production.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2013/01/19/welcome-home
“IDEALLY”, said Jack Welch in 1998, when he was chief executive of General Electric, “you’d have every plant you own on a barge to move with currencies and changes in the economy.” Reality followed vision for Mr Welch, who was a pioneer of offshoring, setting up one of the first offshore service centres in Gurgaon on the outskirts of Delhi.
The US is talking about starting a war, had government shutdown issues recently, and has a president that is abrasive on foreign affairs. UK is dealing with brexit.
China may have the issue with HK recently, but to an outsider, they look more stable. Of course, something like Japan or Australia seems better, but China isn't a terrible choice.
It's now a dictatorship, with a single man ruling for life. The history of dictatorships shows, for fundamental reasons, stability in the short term and chaos in the medium.
(The fundamental reasons include not being able to back away from bad decisions, eliminating competent rivals, and as a result bumbling into crises that seem to escalate themselves.)
Even the US was very undemocratic for most of its history (remember when only white male landowners could vote?), and that didn’t stop its ascendancy to world superpower.
New leadership in a dictatorship often means a quiet realignment at the top. China tends to use the corruption excuse, but look at the upper leadership after such transitions and you find many new faces.
This is a cartoon take on China. Yes, China is led by a fairly Leninist party structure in nominal terms, but in terms of management China is relatively decentralised. Politically but in particular fiscally regional and local authorities manage day-to-day operations with significant leeway depending on the region, anything else would be unfeasible in a country with 1.4 billion people.
The bureaucratic nature of the Chinese state (which is really thousands of years old) makes comparisons to Western strongman dictatorships impossible. There's a reason the communist state has survived Mao, market reforms under Deng and now Xi, and it's not because it's run by some big brother figure who gets assassinated and then everything collapses.
China's party structure was fine and decidedly non-dictatorial. Deng was not a dictator and neither was Hu Jintao. They did not, like Xi has, ensconce themselves as leaders for life [1].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/26/xi-jinping-chi...
China was certainly much more dictatorial than any Western country before this change, and it isn't much more dictatorial now. Xi's extension of time in office isn't really related to governance as much as it is related to the problem of succession. With significant amounts of the old guard finally reaching retirement age, there is a fear of political instability in the party.
And the way he has done that is by imprisoning and killing competitors to his power. The fact that he could even contemplate bringing the term limit up indicated that he was certain at that point that there was no one to compete with him within the party, who would protest the term limits removal.
Name one country that is more stable for mass production than China?
Its just not the leafy vision of stability you had in mind.
All governments work towards stability in their own ways. I don't see desperation in Chinese strategy, but I do see a lot of energy.
You are free to use any word to describe it, you could also call it "expense." China is spending time and energy on suppressing dissent proportional to their fear of their own people. The CCP has decided that the risk of being deposed is high enough to justify the cost and effort required to implement all of those nightmarish schemes.
China is investing in increased stability. US assumes they are very stable and thus takes on a lot of destabilizing actions.
So a lot of people deduce that China will be more stable than USA in N years.
Batista's Cuba was very stable and friendly to foreign investment too, for instance. Then along came Castro, and suddenly not only was it not particularly stable, but lots of those foreign companies had all their holdings expropriated by the new government for having collaborated with their oppressor. Oops!
I think what's happening more is that westerners are projecting their own culture and philosophies onto the population. Americans are especially passionate about free-speech and they assume that Chinese citizen's share that, hence all the doom prophesying like your comment.
If they weren't, how would you know? Do you honestly think anyone who isn't would be dumb enough to say so out loud, especially to a pollster or a foreigner?
Anecdotally I spent half a year in China, and whenever I brought up the censorship with people who lived there, I got more than just a few responses where they rolled their eyes and said we (Americans) are obsessed with it, followed up with, "Who cares?"
After all, China is continually upgrading its surveillance and other means of social control. They're also committing cultural genocide in Xinjang despite the international media fallout. They must feel like there's some real threat worth fighting to do all this.
Also unlike the other top 8 or so world economies, China has had an internal revolution/civil war quite recently.
India