Apple faces Beijing blackout for iPhone 6 Apple has lost a patent infringement lawsuit that could see the iPhone booted from China's capital. The Beijing Intellectual Property Office this week ruled that Apple's iPhone 6 and 6 Plus ripped off patented designs held by Chinese smartphone maker Shenzhen Baili, which flogs a handset called the 100C. Apple has appealed …
India can be unfriendly towards business in some regions as well and if ban them as well now you just eliminated over 1/3 of the world's population. Still have to agree in general about China. Had several opportunities to work there even with a significant raise and declined. Lots of problems everywhere but at least you generally understand the ones at home or even most in the developed world.
Lots of Chinese companies are doing fine in China - been doing so for a while (you might have noticed the rise of China).
I suspect the real takeaway message is simply "Be careful of wading in where you don't have lobbyists".
Apple's kicking of Samsung in the US was equally as dubious as the kicking they're currently receiving in China. Slapping "Designed in California" on the back of your phones? Not enough to convince the "Made in USA" brigade, but probably enough to piss off China a smidge.
> the general trend is to shut down foreign presence in China. Get the message???
... as if the West doesn't do the same. We are more subtle with it and we done it for so long there is little need for additional legal protections.
We call them, "industries of particular national importance" and we don't outright ban imports (that would be "in restraint of trade") we use tax money to subsidise our local industry so it can undercut them furriners.
That's how we end up with corn mountains in the US, wine and milk lakes in the EU. It leads to the ungodly sight of food either being destroyed while much of the world is starving or the food being dumped on the world market - tax money from the rich nations destroying the markets and livelihoods of the poor around the world who might otherwise make a living growing crops.
The US corn over-production is what drives the HFCS market leading to really cheap sugar which makes its way into so much food, resulting in ill-health.
Does anyone (apart from Apple) really have a problem with what the Chinese are doing? Isn't "making decisions that the market wouldn't make" the role of government? Having seen Apple's attacks on Samsung, they might come to the conclusion that Apple manipulate the legal and patent system to increase their super-normal profits and it is therefore quite legitimate to rebalance the playing field to help with local industry develop.
Or it might just be corruption. Which is bad, and our governments would never take money from lobbyists which may influence their decisions, would they?
Picking up your point about "milk lakes" etc. I think surplus in the EU is generally passed on to poorer countries (and food banks internally within the EU) so that it doesn't all go to waist.
I believe that there have also been years (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy#Oversupply_and_its_redistribution) where the surplus has been used when there were shortages and this resulted in calls for more storage.... ironic really.
I think milk production has recently seen quotas removed in the EU.
I've no idea what the US does with its excess corn.
As for trading in China: It seems to me that you have to understand their culture and rules and not expect everything to work as it does in the US. From a third part perspective both the US and China have, what my culture would consider, dodgy practices. I can't really see that one is worse than the other although personally I found China easier to deal with.
From what I've read, the Chinese are almost as bad as the States on patents. Only a Chinese citizen/company can file a patent and thus, no other patents apply. In this case, rip the design off from any non-Chinese company, patent it and you've got that company by the shorthairs. Applies to copyrights also.
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
Eventually, though, the Chinese are going to overstep their extortion shenanigans and find themselves without Western technology or the resulting manufacturing jobs.
Apple has been slowly but inexorably moving away from Samsung as a supplier and they could do the same with China. Apple has the scale and the cash to pull it off. Admittedly, it would happen at a snail's pace. By the time the Chinese would notice, it would be too late.
Apple would only need to change the location of the iPhone's assembly to leave China, not the company that does it. Alternatively, they could decide to automate it a lot more heavily instead of relying on so many people, making it feasible to move manufacturing to the US. Even though that would cost more, it would score them a lot of political points on an issue that has been one of the hot buttons that helped Trump's rise.
While Apple alone moving their manufacturing out of China would be just a drop in the bucket in an economy China's size, it would be devastating if many other US and western companies followed suit. Apple makes a lot of money selling iPhones in China, so they aren't going to make wholesale changes anytime soon. However, if China closed the door on imports, western companies would have reason to look elsewhere for their manufacturing needs.
China no longer has the lowest manufacturing labor cost. Moving manufacturing operations to a new country is something many companies are comfortable with, having successfully executed it within the past 10-15 years to move manufacturing into China!
Look to Samsung. Apple had a dispute with them, and it has taken them years, but they have been slowly disentangling themselves from reliance on Samsung wherever possible. By sole sourcing the manufacturing of the A8 with TSMC, Samsung's fab division suffered massive losses as they were left with tons of unused capacity.
Do you have any evidence Samsung suffered from losing a chip fab contract with Apple? I found some speculation that they might, but the journalist only gave 50/50 odds on that speculation, and he believed Samsung could find other work for their fabs. I saw some speculation that Samsung would delay opening one of their new fabs, but with hindsight, we see it started production in good time. Samsung also invested $3.5billion in a fab in Texas, and $14billion in a new fab in Korea. Hardly the actions of a company worried about lack of orders.
Apple may make a vast amount of money, but they do not make that many phones. Samsung sell far more than Apple, and a wide range of other kit too. Apple are notorious for demanding low prices from sub-contractors. Loss of a supply contract with Apple probably boosted Samsung's profits. The best way to suffer from losing an Apple contract is if you do an exclusive deal like GT Advanced Technologies. (Apple used to buy displays from Samsung. When they stopped, quality problems with iPhone displays hit the news, followed by Apple doing a deal with GT to make Sapphire glass).
This patent spat in Beijing is a storm in a teacup compared to Apple vs Samsung, but it couldn't happen to a more deserving company. (Unicode has a square with rounded corners: ▢. Is there a reason for lack of a similar rectangle?)
Maybe China is just using Microsoft tactics. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
First they open the markets to the outside world.
Next they import the manufacturing, offering to do it cheaper
Then they make it themselves and undercut the competition.
Now, foreign companies are having more than the usual "difficulties" in China. Apple aren't the only company having "problems" there.
China has 1000's of years of form playing the long slow game.
Apple sells enough iPhones, iPads and Apple TVs to order nearly 300 million A* SoCs per year, that's larger than the number of PCs that were sold last year (which means Apple probably buys more SoCs than Intel sells CPUs now) That's not insignificant in anyone's book.
While it is true that Samsung sells more phones than Apple does, they use their own SoCs in a minority of them. They will need to use their own SoCs in all their phones, or start selling them to other Android OEMs, if they want to fill the massive hole in Samsung's foundry utilization that Apple left behind. There are rumors that Qualcomm will have Samsung fab some of their lower end Snapdragon SoCs, that could also do the trick, if true.
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