Samsung uses the same company to make its phones, Foxconn, that Apple does to assemble its phones. Whatever the case is about child labor, my point is expecting a single company to be able to sidestep the enormous labor arbitrage from manufacturing in China/SE Asia is naive. Surely there are many qualified people who work to determine what price premium the public is willing to pay versus going to a competitor.

Are you saying that the $1K phones that Samsung manufactures in South Korea are made by Foxconn? If you are, then please present proof. If not, then you're missing the point.

Same for Sony, LG, etcetra.

This article is from 2012:

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2023286/foxconn-samsung-face...

But Samsung has facilities in China too:

https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/about-us/location/manu...

Another 2012 article about labor practices at Samsung factories:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/these...

The point is everyone uses cheap labor for manufacturing if possible, whether it's China or elsewhere. If they did not, then their mass market products would probably be priced too high and customers would reward competitors and they would go out of business. No one is paying higher paid people in South Korea or Japan to assemble phones if it can be done drastically cheaper elsewhere.

Another article about Sony using Foxconn and other ODMs:

http://www.xperiablog.net/2012/06/19/sony-mobile-partners-wi...

I assume LG and Samsung are big enough to have their own facilities and be ODMs themselves, but I would guess the smaller players like Sony have to outsource to them.

Yes, they've partnered with Foxconn in the past and have had (now closed) factories in China. This is not what I was asking about.

Fact is, they do manufacture phones in South Korea. Not all their phones, but they do manufacture them. Evidently it's still profitable enough to do so, and evidently they do not charge $10K for their top-of-the-line Galaxy S phones made in SK. https://www.businessinsider.com/samsung-gumi-factory-2014-5?...

Sony has also made phones in SK and Japan.

Obviously these are not contenders for the cheapest phone, but we weren't talking about the cheap Xiaomis and Huaweis anyway. And evidently lots and lots of people are happy to pay for more expensive phones. Apple has ridiculous profit margins and people still pay for it.

$10k was a made up number to show that it would add considerable expense to bring every element in the supply chain up to par with the living standards in developed countries. For example, do the South Korea phones still use materials that originate from mines in the Congo?

I assume if Samsung had figured out how to make phones with better labor practices than Apple, then they would be advertising it. Seems like pretty easy PR points to win business, so I would have to wonder why not? I am guessing it is either inconsistent across their product lines or labor practices are increasing over the years.

>Samsung uses the same company to make its phones, Foxconn

They dont. The only model they did that was some specific Chinese Model. And even that was small volume.