Saya setuju bhw highly skilled labor dan infrastruktur tidak ada yg bisa
mengalahkan Tiongkok disunia ini, sekarang ini. Jepang, Korea Selatan,
(barangkali juga Singapura). setingkat dgn Tiongkok tetapi ongkos pegawainya
lebih mahal drpd di Tiongkok. Sesudah/dibawah negara2 ini, kemudian adalah
Vietnam dgn ongkosnya lebih murah tetapi SDM nya kalah dgn negara2 disebut
sebelumnya. Kalau negara2 lain di Asia Tengara masih dibelakang Vietnam.
On Tuesday, June 2, 2020, 11:22:49 AM PDT, kh djie [email protected]
[GELORA45] <[email protected]> wrote:
Apple CEO Tim Cook: This Is the No. 1 Reason We MakeiPhones in China (It's Not
What You Think)
China is much more than a source oflow-cost, low-skilled labor.
Getty Images
Take a look at the back of the box from which youunpacked your iPhone and
you'll see this:"Designed by Apple in California Assembled in China."
Reading this tagline might trigger a vision in yourmind of Jonathan Ive,
Apple's legendary chief designofficer, dropping the drawings and technical
specs for the next-generationiPhone into a (highly secure) shared folder that
its low-cost suppliersin China can access as they manufacture andassemble the
product by the millions.
But as Apple CEO Tim Cook recently pointed out, thispicture wouldn't tell the
entire story of how an iPhone actually gets madetoday, or why Apple prefers to
make them in China. At the Fortune Global Forumin Guangzhou in early December
(my firm, McKinsey & Company, was theKnowledge Partner), I listened to Cook as
he explained why Apple continues tofavor China as its central base for
manufacturing iPhones:
The number one reason why we like to bein China is the people. China has
extraordinary skills. And the part that's themost unknown is there's almost two
million application developers in China thatwrite apps for the iOS App Store.
These are some of the most innovative mobileapps in the world, and the
entrepreneurs that run them are some of the mostinspiring and entrepreneurial
in the world. Those are sold not only here butexported around the world.
Highly skilled software developers developing apps for the App Store areone
reason Apple likes to be in China. But the depth of highly skilled labor inthe
manufacturing space is why Apple makes its iPhones there:
Chinahas moved into very advanced manufacturing, so you find in China
theintersection of craftsman kind of skill, and sophisticated robotics and
thecomputer science world. That intersection, which is very rare to find
anywhere,that kind of skill, is very important to our business because of the
precisionand quality level that we like. The thing that most people focus on if
they'rea foreigner coming to China is the size of the market, and obviously
it's thebiggest market in the world in so many areas. But for us, the number
oneattraction is the quality of the people.
Citing an example of the type of a highly skilled supplier Apple worksclosely
with, Cook talked at length about recently visiting one company that ithas
collaborated with for several years:
Ivisited ICT--they manufacture, among other things, the AirPods for us. When
youthink about AirPods as a user, you might think it couldn't be that hard
becauseit's really small. The AirPods have several hundred componentsin them,
and the level of precision embedded into the audio quality--withoutgetting into
really nerdy engineering--it's really hard. And it requires alevel of skill
that's extremely high.
And the ideathat Apple simply hands over the design to a company like ICT,
which justmanufacturers according to spec, is simply untrue, says Cook:
It's notdesigned and sent over--that sounds like there's no interaction. The
truth is,the process engineering and process development associated with our
productsrequire innovation in and of itself. Not only the product but the way
that it'smade, because we want to make things in the scale of hundreds of
millions, andwe want the quality level of zero defects. That's always what we
strive for,and the way that you get there, particularly when you're pushing the
envelopein the type of materials that you have, and the precision that
yourspecifications are forcing, requires a kind ofhand-in-glove partnership.
You don't do it by throwing it over the chasm.It would never work. I can't
imagine how that would be.
Addressing the designed-in-California, made-in-low-cost-China impressionthat
many people have--an impression reinforced by the tagline that is printedon
every box containing a new iPhone--Cook had this to say:
There'sa confusion about China. The popular conception is that companies come
to Chinabecause of low labor cost. I'm not sure what part of China they go to,
but thetruth is China stopped being the low-labor-cost country many years ago.
Andthat is not the reason to come to China from a supply point of view. The
reasonis because of the skill, and the quantity of skill in one location and
the typeof skill it is.
And China has an abundance of skilled labor unseen elsewhere, says Cook:
Theproducts we do require really advanced tooling, and the precision that you
haveto have, the tooling and working with the materials that we do are state of
theart. And the tooling skill is very deep here. In the U.S., you could have
ameeting of tooling engineers and I'm not sure we could fill the room. In
China,you could fill multiple football fields.
Cook credits China's vast supply ofhighly skilled vocational talent: The
vocational expertise is very very deep here, and Igive the education system a
lot of credit for continuing to push on that evenwhen others were
de-emphasizing vocational. Now I think many countries in theworld have woke up
and said this is a key thing and we've got to correct that.China called that
right from the beginning.
