Re:Is It Time to Rethink Globalized Supply Chains?
by hinkley on Thursday March 19, 2020 @02:44PM
(#22630375)
Before he was CEO, Tim Cook was handling logistics for Apple, wasn't he?
I haven't been at many companies where a customer paid us money specifically to build up capacity for them first. Most of the time I've had to ramp up, we had to pay for it out of investment dollars or scraped out of contracts specifically for deliverables. Even when we special-built a feature for a customer, we still had to find a way to generalize it for others to turn a profit on it, and that was out of pocket.
Apple has apparently paid a number of manufactures to get good at something in exchange for a short lockup period and a permanent discount on orders. Which I think is why when Intel tried to make their first direct Macbook competitor, it turned out their margins were razor thin compared to Apple's.
I haven't been at many companies where a customer paid us money specifically to build up capacity for them first. Most of the time I've had to ramp up, we had to pay for it out of investment dollars or scraped out of contracts specifically for deliverables. Even when we special-built a feature for a customer, we still had to find a way to generalize it for others to turn a profit on it, and that was out of pocket.
Apple has apparently paid a number of manufactures to get good at something in exchange for a short lockup period and a permanent discount on orders. Which I think is why when Intel tried to make their first direct Macbook competitor, it turned out their margins were razor thin compared to Apple's.