The Cost Of Iphones

Submitted By tverstrate
Words: 605
Pages: 3

According to chinawisper.com the largest smart phone vendors are ZTE, Huawei, Lenovo, cool pad, ziaomi , meizu. These companies are innovative and do incredible things they make their own operating systems, make the worlds thinnest smart phone 5.7mm and actually care about battery life.
The iphone is manufactured in china by a company foxconn and contributes according to the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in tokyo .8% $1.9 billion to the US trade deficit. It employs one million people. The iphone contributes to the chineese economy for sure. Consider the costs of the iphones “innovation” The factory workers, because that is all they are zero skill, work a minimum of 12 hours a day for around $400 maybe per month, wired magazine broke the story that 12 kill themselves every 3 months, to reduce their liability the put up nets and a signs that read “You can throw yourself off any building you like, as long as it isn’t one of these.” This shows that they are not investing in the people, care nothing about bettering their lives. Starts to make us question that value a little bit, question the costs behind it. a study supported by grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the U.S. National Science Foundation was done by Kenneth Kraemer, Greg Linden and Jason Dedrick from university of California Irvine, University of California at Berkeley and Syracuse University respectively.
Their study showed that Apple captures the largest share of value retaining 58.5% $232 of revenues to chinas 1.8%( about 7 bucks). This is done by controlling the manufacturer itself they cut costs in every way they can. They went on to say
What I feel the real takeaway is, “ High-volume electronics manufacturing…. is not the path to “good jobs” or “economic growth.” You can have high paying manufacturing jobs, but your not going to get a lot of them. The money is in design, software and retailing of products like apple does, not manufacturing them like china does for apple. The iphone should be kept out of china, allowing the market to be dominated by innovative chineese firms. Frims that focus on design, software and the retailing of products, keeping the high value jobs that offer growth(personally and economically) in china.

China cannot innovate.
China has businesses, entrepreneurs, market strength, people, research programs and high-tech zones encouraging domestic firms to boost