sirozha

GeorgeBMac said:

sirozha said:

Huawei will be just fine. China wanted to become independent of the West in its technological development by 2024. China can simply stop their people from buying the iPhone and also they can order all iPhone manufacturing in China to be shut down immediately. 

After the Coronavirus impact on the economy eases off, there will be an incredible push by the Chinese government to influence (or order) the Chinese consumers to buy domestic products exclusively. Fortunately for China, they can pretty much become economically independent from the West overnight. 

The consequences of the Coronavirus epidemic in China will be economic nationalism of never before heard or seen scale. The 2018 boycott of the iPhone by the Chinese consumers will look like a joke compared to what is coming. The Chinese government is pissed at the world for isolating China in these challenging times. China will retaliate once they get a handle on this epidemic. 

What’s going for the Chinese brands is a tremendous buying power of the Chinese market and the most robust manufacturing infrastructure in the world. Add the communist ideology and the ability to manipulate consumer sentiment by the government, and you get a powerful cocktail that will allow China to continue to develop without having to rely on the West for the technology or the markets. 

Instead of worrying what will happen to Huawei, worry about what will happen to Apple, which has no contingency plan for making its products in the comparable volumes outside of China. Apple also depends heavily on the Chinese market to sell their products. Even though China doesn’t represent the largest share of the Apple’s market, the drop in the China sales of the Apple products will have a profound effect in the Apple’s bottom
line and the AAPL share price. Just remember what happened to AAPL at the end of 2018, when Apple’s sales in China dropped by 18%. The AAPL stock lost 40% of its value. Now imagine if the Chinese reduce their purchases of Apple products by 50% or 75%. What will the effect be if the Chinese government shuts down all manufacturing of Apple products in China as a retaliation for the American treatment of Huawei and the imposed isolation of China during the early stages of the Coronavirus epidemic?

Yes, China is planning on making itself independent, but only of Trump's bully tactics and propaganda -- where he suddenly tries to tariff them out of a key market and/or restrict their access to vital services, products and materials.

Otherwise, since Nixon resolved our cold war with them 50 years ago, they have been and plan to continue competing as any other country does in the open and fair international markets.   They have no desire to isolate themselves -- that's a Trump thing, not a China thing.

I guess you haven’t heard about the Communist Party goal for China to become technologically independent by 2024. 

blastdoor said:

spice-boy said:

I hope it does, you can all live a few months longer without the newest iPhone, tens of thousands won't live to see that iPhone get a grip. 

Annual global deaths from the seasonal flu: between 291,000 and 646,000
https://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=208914

Annual global deaths from traffic accidents: about 1.25 million
https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/

So... clearly China should ban cars and keep everyone locked in their houses until the flu goes away. 

Silly comment. You should be factoring in the rate of this virus spreading. Today, there are over 14,000 new cases - 10 times that of yesterday new cases. 

polymnia said:

sirozha said:

polymnia said:

sirozha said:

davewrite said:

sirozha said:

 Apple doesn’t want to invest a couple hundred billion dollars in building real robots that can assemble iPhones. 

so replacing people's jobs with robots is the great solution ?
Apple providing jobs is why you don't want to buy Apple products or invest in aapl ?

Workers travel across the country to work at Foxconn. The wages there are way higher than what they could get at other jobs. Some according to reports earn 10 times their parents incomes.

(I belief in diversifying manufacturing and supply. But too often people's criticism of Apple's China operations is xenophobic racism masquerading as 'concern'. )

It’s not the responsibility of Apple or its shareholders to provide jobs to the poor Chinese citizens. It’s the responsibility of the Chinese government. 

 

I’m gonna push back on the idea that it’s the Chinese government’s job to find jobs for poor citizen’s. Is that really true? Maybe as an authoritarian regime, it is. If so, should it be? Shouldn’t the government be creating a legal & regulatory environment that is conducive to doing business while protecting vulnerable worker & environmental resources and enforcing those policies fairly & transparently?

It’s a good argument, but that’s a totally different discussion. Normally,  governments are responsible for making sure the citizens live in prosperity. How they do that is another thing. However, I agree with you that for us, as Americans, the whole concept of the government being concerned with the livelihoods of its citizens is a completely bizarre idea. It’s totally foreign to us that the government should devise a system where everyone has healthcare. I know. 

That doesn’t change the fact that in all
other developed countries governments, in fact, concern themselves with improving lives of their citizens and creating systems like universal healthcare that benefit everyone. 

As for China, of course it’s a totalitarian country. So, be truthful with yourself why you are investing in AAPL: to benefit yourself by taking advantage of impoverished Chinese workers or to improve the lives of the impoverished Chinese workers by moving them from their villages into Foxconn barracks. 

Those Europeans who invested in slave trading corporations in the 17th and 18th centuries may have also deluded themselves that they were helping to civilize primitive Africans by transporting them in slave ships from African rainforests to American plantations. The reality
was quite different, though. They invested in slave trade to make tremendous profits by exploiting poor Africans. 

I see where you are going, and perhaps your original point that I focused on "It’s not the responsibility of Apple or its shareholders to provide jobs to the poor Chinese citizens. It’s the responsibility of the Chinese government. " wasn't exactly what you meant to say. I'm in full agreement that healthcare is an appropriate thing for government to provide (falls under "protect vulnerable workers" in my comment. I'm an American, so I don't take it for granted that the government will provide me healthcare, I'm also a business owner, so I actually write the check out every month for my family's insurance.

Sticking with my original point, I don't think it should be the Chinese government's responsibility to find better jobs for individuals. This is the kind of thing that happened in Soviet-style communist countries and it didn't work out too well. The Chinese government, if they are not satisfied with the current job prospects of the Chinese industrial worker (not something I suspect they spend much time worrying about in their currently booming economy), should enact policies to protect their workers/environment. Then companies like Apple will have to decide if the higher cost of doing business in China is worth it. Maybe they will? At the same time, China should probably also work on encouraging other kinds of businesses to replace the type of industry that will likely exit the country since India, Thailand, Vietnam, etc would probably be overjoyed to take over the sweatshop device gadget assembly work if China was no longer interested/viable.

I happen to also be a business owner and also write a check for my insurance every month. Starting in April, my family monthly insurance premiums are going up to $1500/month, which is 12% higher than now. I also lived in the Soviet Union and later Russia half of my life, so I know what happened there. I can tell you that with all the downsides of a government-owned economy, everyone at least had free medical care and free education, including higher education (university/college level), and free graduate schools (master/doctorate level). But, I'm not speaking of the Chinese government as a pure communist government. Even though their ideology is communist, their economy is capitalist with a higher government control than in the US. It is absolutely the job of the Chinese government to pull their poor into the middle class. In fact, it's not I who is saying this; it's the Chinese government itself who made this one of their goals. They have achieved tremendous success in that regard. The Chinese middle class now well exceeds the entire population of the US. China has created a tremendous amount of wealth in the past 25-30 years since America and other Western countries started outsourcing manufacturing to China. The Chinese were able to copy and steal so much technology from the West that they are now able to  invent new things without having to steal intellectual property anymore. At  the same time, they acquired a tremendous amount of knowledge in manufacturing processes, while we, in the United States, have lost all of our ability to manufacture things domestically. 

The Chinese government has done well for the Chinese citizens. They will continue to improve the livelihoods of the Chinese citizens. It's not the responsibility of Apple or any other US corporation to create jobs for the Chinese citizens, thus justifying having ridiculously low manufacturing costs. However, it should be the responsibility of Apple to be an ethical corporation by not using slave labor, and Apple is failing badly at this responsibility, even though they promote themselves as an ethical corporation. 

I hope the Apple customers and shareholders are content with the fact that Apple products are manufactured by workers who live in the “barracks” on manufacturing sites. 

SpamSandwich said:

France: “We can’t compete, so we levy fines against everyone.”

Have you tried their cheese and wine?