The New York Times’ weekend feature on Why Apple Manufacture iPhones in China focused on the underlying reasons why manufacturing has become concentrated in the PRC.
While much of the commentary on the article has – correctly – focused on how US manufacturing move to China is destroying the economic bases of the American working and middle classes, there’s also another serious consequence of the story; the destruction of the US supply chain.
The story itself emphasised this;
In part, Asia was attractive because the semiskilled workers there were cheaper. But that wasn’t driving Apple. For technology companies, the cost of labor is minimal compared with the expense of buying parts and managing supply chains that bring together components and services from hundreds of companies.
While wage costs are important, far more critical are the surrounding supply chains. Without those, even if you want to manufacture in the US or anywhere else you’ll struggle to find suppliers and skilled labour.
The amazing thing with the United States is the world’s most powerful economy has managed to dismantle most of their supply chains that took a century to develop inside twenty years whil China has built up most of theirs since they joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001.
For the United States economy, the effects are more subtle and dramatic than they first appear. The accompanying video to their story illustrates how the multiplier effect, the number of jobs created in the wider economy for each industry worker is as much 4.7 for a manufacturing job, while a service sector worker is less than 1.
That means less employment and less wealth.
For the US, and most the Western world, we were able to avoid the effects of becoming less wealthy over the last decade by spending big on credit cards. Homes that would have been out of reach to the average American – or Australian, Brit or Irishman – were kept accessible by easy, cheap credit.
As that credit dries up with the end of the Twentieth Century debt supercycle, the economic basis of this model is eroding.
For most of us in the Western, developed world it means we are going to become poorer. Chinese and Indian workers might catch up with our living standards, but that standard will be at a lower level that we anticipated a decade or two ago.
The most interesting consequence of the New York Times’ story is what happens to the managerial classes?
Right now they appear to be riding high as their companies’ profits increase and they award themselves trips to the Paris Ritz and receive 50 million dollar payouts when caught cheating on their expenses.
Over time though this cannot continue as the senior managers themselves have become major cost centres which will eventually have to be reduced.
Indeed Apple, the leader in the outsourcing trend, is unique among US companies in that it had a driven, visionary leader and doesn’t have a bloated, self indulgent cohort of bureaucrats managing the business.
With every stage of the deskilling of America and the offshoring of supply chains, there’s been the belief that “it could happen to me” to various groups of workers – we’re now seeing the same process happen in white collar professions like the law are subcontracted to Indian and Philipino service providers.
Senior managers should have no illusions the same will happen to them as the search for cost savings runs out of targets in the rest of organisations.
The biggest problem though is that loss of supply chains and industry knowledge. The question is, can you rebuild that capacity in decade in the way China did?
Supply company image courtesy of Stock Xchange and Andy McMillan.