China’s iPhone ban accelerates across government and state-run companies

More Chinese agencies and state-backed companies across the country have asked their staff to not bring Apple iPhones and other foreign devices to work, Bloomberg News reports Friday, citing “people familiar with the matter.”

Bloomberg News:
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Multiple state firms and government departments across at least eight provinces — including the prosperous coast — instructed employees in the past month or two to start carrying local brands, according to people familiar with the matter. That’s a major step-up from around September, when a small number of agencies in Beijing and Tianjin began telling staff to leave foreign devices at home, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing confidential orders.

The much broader, coordinated effort marks a dramatic quickening of Beijing’s campaign to wean itself off American technology, coinciding with the resurgent popularity of homegrown brand Huawei Technologies Co. Xi Jinping’s administration this year decided to expand a ban on foreign devices beyond the most sensitive departments — a directive that had been in place for years — to encompass many more government agencies and even state firms, Bloomberg News reported in September…

Apple gets the majority of the world’s iPhones from sprawling factories run by suppliers like Foxconn Technology Group that together employ millions of Chinese. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook was the architect of the company’s strategy to outsource manufacturing to China two decades ago. He has worked hard since to maintain positive ties with Beijing, even as Apple has begun shifting more production capacity to other countries including India.

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MacDailyNews Take: Sounds like Tim Cook’s latest Chinese Communist Party ass-kissing tour failed to achieve its desired effect.

As we wrote last November:
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In 2016, Apple’s “Operations Genius,” Tim Cook, secretly signed a secret agreement with the human rights-abusing Chinese Communist Party estimated to be worth more than $275 billion. Cook promised that Apple would do its part to develop China’s economy and technological prowess via infrastructure investments, business deals, and worker training in exchange for the CCP quashing its surge of what promised to be crippling regulatory actions against Apple, The Information reported last December.
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Many years before that, some two decades ago, it was Cook who spearheaded Apple’s move to make products “Designed in California,” but “Assembled in China.”
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Since Cook, 62, made his $275 billion secret deal with the CCP five years ago, and as he now nears retirement age, Apple has made precious little headway in diversifying its production away from capricious, authoritarian China.
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Why?
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If the $275 billion wasn’t to buy Apple half a decade to free itself by diversifying its production away from China, mitigating risk, what was it for?
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Longtime Apple analyst Gene Munster [in November 2022] estimated that it would take as long as a decade for Apple to reduce its current near-total reliance on China to meaningful levels.
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At the current rate, it doesn’t look like Apple has 10 months, much less 10 years to extricate itself from China.
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Tim Cook painted Apple into this corner. It worked marvelously well, until it didn’t.
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A publicly traded company CEO’s job is to act in the best interest of its shareholders.
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But, Apple’s operations don’t scream “genius” today. They scream “RISK!” But, you know, the market just loooves risk.
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Apple shareholders and, in turn, Apple’s rubber-stamping Board of Lackeys, should hold one person responsible if this spiraling China dilemma continues deteriorate: Timothy D. Cook.
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So, what’s Cook’s plan for getting the company out of this boxed-in predicament into which he placed it? Certainly Apple shareholders have a right to know.