How did Tim Cook fix Apple's broken supply chain? | Hacker News Reader

How did Tim Cook fix Apple's broken supply chain?

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22 pointsshry4ns4 comments

Efficient Supply Chain’s only get mentioned when talking about Amazon or Walmart’s but it’s unbelievable how complex Apple’s supply chain is and how much it contributed to Apple.

I understand that inventory is evil but how does supply chain really solve it? I still have to keep X number of unit in inventory (aka "buffer") to deal with fluctuating demand. A top answer says that Apple now keeps only 2 days worth of inventory which is quite impressive. If suppliers somehow can do "on-demand" same-day manufacturing then so can I (no?). I would in fact think coordinating between various parts of supply chain will cause inherent delays which will in turn increase the inventory you will need to keep. The large complex supply chain is kind of anti-thesis of monolithic gigafactory concept by Musk. One may argue that Musk isn't successful but I would say with enough capital he should be able to scale up and might get same results as Apple.

As non american, I’d love to know more about this kind of business with China, and how it relates to the US government political choices. Why the US looks so scared by China, if it has such economic relatons eith it?

> As non american, I’d love to know more about this kind of business with China, and how it relates to the US government political choices. Why the US looks so scared by China, if it has such economic relatons eith it?

It's not just the US. The entire west is afraid of China. In around the Reagan years, the US - along with almost the entire west - offshored their manufacturing to China et al. Of course, now it's been about 40 years since and almost all of large scale manufacturing has moved to china (i.e. steel).

In the end the west wanted cheap imports, and they got it. But IMHO we are beginning to wake up to the fact that nothing is for free (as always), and what the west gained from having a virtually 1-billion-strong externalised pseudo-slavary labour force, they will pay in their own demise as an entire western generation grows up unable to build anything, begging to be economically annhiliated. The west made china a god and asked for bountiful reward - who wants to bet they will give it to the west forever?

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