Samsung ends mobile phone production in China
reuters.com
reuters.com
https://www.economist.com/asia/2018/04/12/why-samsung-of-sou...
Also when we say "make" I assume we mean "assembles".
Somewhat anecdotally I recently purchased a laptop and tried to find one that wasn't made in China and it was nigh on impossible.
I've been to Hai Phong, which is the city in the north near the China border where most of this commerce happens. It is fascinating to see how big the houses are there. If you drive along the road to the airport it is literally filled with old men riding their nice shiny new bicycles and exercising by the side of the road.
The tariffs definitely have people looking into Vietnam a lot more. I've driven (motorbike) the dirt backroads near the Chinese border where there is nothing but trees and mountains. There are literally trucks brining goods into and out of Vietnam (illegally) on hastily constructed dirt roads. You can see it in google maps even. I've seen how people have strung cables over rivers between China and Vietnam to ferry goods back and forth. So yea... it is happening, it just isn't hitting the news much. It is also happening in Cambodia and Laos. Look into the roads China is building and how Sihanouk is a literal Chinese eco disaster.
Fascinating times...
There are also illegal but protected casinos near the Vietnam-China border entry, that only allow in Chinese nationals.
I also drove into Laos near the north side and all through it as well. The amount of Chinese influence in Laos is overwhelming.
Also who knows how long Samsung has been working on such things.
Samsung had been irrelevant in China for some years now, like below 1% market share. It just can't compete
US is by far the only market that Chinese phones haven't dominated, but that is for a reason. Buying an Android in US there has surprising limited choices, Samsung/OnePlus/Pixel in that Order, and that is it. It is Duoploy either Samsung or iPhone, and others don't play.
Adding Huawei+Xiaomi+Oppo+Vivo alone counts 45% of the world smart share already, by units, and the others consisting ZTE/Lenovo and other Chinese brands as well. Safe to say the Chinese phones are already 50% of all phones shipped.
Yes, it is pretty dominating. Had not for the Trump ban, Huawei would probably dethrone Samsung in EU as well, according to analysis in Feb
https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/14/18224614/huawei-chinese-p...
As a gadget enthusiasts, though overall the phone innovation is slowing down, but at least Chinese brands are the fewer left there to churn out marketable features, like those monstrous cameras and tricks to hide it. Apple and Samsung are just being lazy there, with incremental upgrade which command a premium
So Chinese phone manufacturers making up 1/3 of the European market, as per your link, is them dominating it??? Chinese phones don't dominate worldwide in the sense of geography. They dominate worldwide in the sense of units because they are the low margin, budget phone manufacturers supplying lower income parts of the world. Not a bad place to be, but doesn't remotely support your assertion above that the US is the only market they don't dominate. That's obviously wrong just from your own sources.
Considering that a lot or most of the iPhones and Samsung phones sold (well, before the moving out) were also made in China, yes. The 1/3 you mention are just the Chinese brands....
Samsung was basically saved from being overtaken by Huawei as #1 by Trump's ban.
Of course their displays and RAM are probably made in Korea or China as are the SSDs and I've never pulled one apart to check the motherboard and battery providence...
However they are definitely assembled in Japan.
It would have been fascinating to study Japan in the 80's, but now really sure they are still "self-sufficient."
Japan's auto industry is still strong, but their future largely depends on impending trade deal with Trump. Their tech/semiconductor industry has been in decline the past 30 years and what little remains today are being sold to Chinese/Taiwanese companies bit by bit. Japanese brands like SONY or Panasonic now accounts for less than 10% of the US market now, replaced by mostly Koreans like Samsung and LG in high-end, and by Chinese by TCL in low-end markets. The consumer camera business is still dominated by Japanese companies, but the business itself is in a crisis as the market, which peaked in 2013, continues to dive by 30% - 60% annually last several years.It would have been fascinating to study Japan in the 80's, but now really sure they are still "self-sufficient."
Japan's auto industry is still strong, but their future largely depends on impending trade deal with Trump. Their tech/semiconductor industry has been in decline the past 30 years and what little remains today are being sold to Chinese/Taiwanese companies bit by bit. Japanese brands like SONY or Panasonic now accounts for less than 10% of the US market now, replaced by mostly Koreans like Samsung and LG in high-end, and by Chinese by TCL in low-end markets. The consumer camera business is still dominated by Japanese companies, but the business itself is in a crisis as the market, which peaked in 2013, continues to dive by 30% - 60% annually last several years.
Well, it's a bit more than that. While Samsung imports many parts and "assembles" all final products in Vietnam, there are also 200 suppliers and contractors who relocated and "make" their parts in Vietnam.
Vietnam in pre-Samsung era was largely known for low-tech textile export. There wasn't a lot of infrastructure to support Samsung's smartphone operation in Vietnam. Samsung not only had to work with the Vietnamese gov't to create the industrial infrastructure that didn't exist, but the company also had to convince suppliers/contractors to set up shops in Vietnam.
Samsung's products now accounts for about 1/3 of Vietnam's overall export.
It's better than Laos/Cambodia, but the streets are now flooded with cars far more than even 1 year ago, and the traffic is becoming a huge issue.
And right now, with all the new factories, Vietnam is suddenly almost as polluted as China. (Just recently we have record AQI numbers here.) But of course rich countries don't care about that, as long as the phones are cheap...
All in all, people are happy, since it helps their bottom line. But the infrastructure is not there yet to beat China.
Rich countries can help: for example Western companies can mandate that all their suppliers, for their entire chains, down to natural resources, have low levels of pollution.
Vietnam and other countries like it will have to comply, in order to sell their products.
Nike stopped using child labour because of (Western) public outcry, without it they'd go for the factory offering the cheapest price. Next you'll say, then it's up to the Vietnamese to have a public outcry about pollution. But corrupt governments seem to have a way to get away with anything, just look at the Dakota pipeline, or arctic drilling...
Samsung is an extreme vertically integrated company. As far as I am aware there isn't any other company on the planet that is remotely close to this level of integration. Not even Cargrill.
Samsung doesn't just make Display, NAND/ DRAM / Battery, Assembly, Controllers, MEMS, SoC, Foundry but also down to the Chemicals and Materials as well as actual assembly. Think of it as 80% of the whole Shenzhen Ecosystem.
So while other companies have difficulties moving off that Shenzhen Ecosystem, the reality is Samsung was never part of it. Samsung Mobile is the front line to drive all volumes for each of its subsidiary to a sustainable level, before these subsidiary graduate to start selling to third parties. For Samsung, it is only a matter of government signing an agreement to tariffs, clean water, electricity and all these basic infrastructure. And if the government have trouble getting those up, not to worry, you could paid Samsung and Samsung will built those for you ( Samsung is also a construction company ) and promise to hire enough local workers.
This is in deep contrast to Apple which doesn't actually own any part of the supply chain.
My previous phone was a Samsung Galaxy S5 and I was surprised to find out that it was made in Korea. Manufacturing in Korea certainly didn't seem to harm Samsung's financial prospects back then, and the phone wasn't any more expensive than its Made-in-China competitors. I have zero reservations about South Korea's workers' rights protections, workplace health and safety, and environmental regulations.
Too often the discussion becomes:
1. We shouldn't manufacture in China
2. We can't afford to manufacture in US/EU
3. Let's just manufacture in Vietnam/Cambodia/Myanmar instead
When it should be:
a. We shouldn't manufacture in non-democratic countries
b. Let's manufacture in democratic countries instead
Samsung is a Korean company so it's not that weird that they should manufacture things there.
Well, Samsung only just apologised last year to workers for some unusually high rates of cancer among workers at its (local) semiconductor and display factories[1]. It took ten years or more to go through the Korean courts. In general, Korea's industrial death/injury rates are very high compared to Western countries.[2] Workplace health for workers in Korea's electronics industry in general does not appear great, to say the least.[3] Finally, Samsung's treatment of workers in its Vietnam factories is, by most accounts, subpar at best.[4]
I live in Korea and I've been here for about four years. (Note that if we were to cover something outside tech/electronics, like construction, the workplace health and safety situation in Korea would appear even more dismal). I think I've dumped enough links already, but without adding more I will agree that legal protections for workers are quite strong in Korea at the base level, but they are often blatantly disregarded or skirted around by employers.
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/11/samsung-electronics-a...
[2]https://www.ft.com/content/57c76820-d3f0-11e7-8c9a-d9c0a5c8d...
[3]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25938673
[4]https://ipen.org/news/samsung-workers-line%c2%a0unique-repor...
Some things that I think are good about Korean labour law/rights:
-No at-will employment: employers must have a solid reason for firing somebody (misconduct, financial loss, crippling lack of company funds). In practice, this is often skirted through social pressure, i.e. employees encouraged openly to quit, or having their working lives turned into quiet hells until they quit to get away. If a person is fired they must be given either 30 days' notice or 30 days' salary.
-"Pension"/severance pay: all full-time workers accumulate a month's salary for each year worked at a company. Legally this must be paid out within 14 days after leaving a position. My own (Western) country has nothing like this, and I think it's especially good for the Korean context where a person might work for LG, Samsung, or Hyundai for twenty years, then be eased out right when their kids are starting university. Often, they can't find other whitecollar jobs. Every second or third cabbie I talk to in Seoul used to work for one of the big Korean firms. So the severance gives people a bit of a buffer if they randomly get fired or have to quit.
-Strong state-funded healthcare and social safety net.
Two less-good things:
-Koreans famously work some of the longest hours in the OECD, and it's usually overtime that people find it impossible, culturally, to say no to. The government legislated against it this year (all work beyond 8 hours per day and 40 hours per week to be defined as overtime, with time and a half paid for overtime and a maximum of 12 extra hours per week allowed) so hopefully things are going to slowly change there. In practice, people still seem to be working tons of overtime (for which they should be paid extra) without reporting it, but the law is still new.
-Minimum number of leave days per year is around 11-12 for the first year of employment and could be higher. In practice, corporate culture often limits peoples' freedoms around when they can take leave. Lack of separate sick days is common: people have to either use a leave day, or work sick.
1. Every country is susceptible to change government at any time
2. Corporations are in the game for profit, everything else is a kind of nice to have
I've seen this first hand in Ludhiana, India. I know the narrative from the Nike sweat shop days still holds, but large brands are very aware of the backlash they could face and make efforts to improve working conditions wherever they can. If you're a worker in say, India, you're better off working at a factory affiliated with Ikea than one selling to local brands.
People say they support human rights and environment, but then they still go for the price.
Might be a good idea too, the Indian state is a moronic rent-seeking state whose sole purpose it'd often appear is to run a leaky incompetent "welfare state" simply in order to support of its political masters.
Why my interest? I taught Maths (in English) in Zhengzhou for a couple of years and constantly wondered where my students could find employment, so I recently searched online and found these articles about the iPhone assembly plant there. Some things I learnt: assembling iPhones is boringly repetitive, basically just install the same one screw all day, so workers only last about a year; the impetus came from Terry Gou, the Taiwanese billionaire founder of Foxconn; and, in the past, to be purchased by the Chinese, such "foreign goods" had to be shipped to Hong Kong, then turned around and imported back into China, whereas Foxconn negotiated virtual export/import at the touch of a button. The iPhone story, by putting my former Zhengzhou students in the "centre" of the US, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong tensions, made those tensions more "engaging" for me.
And yes, I am concerned about the plight of the Uighurs. I think the repression of that group is directly linked to the 2014 knife killings at Kunming railway station, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Kunming_attack. Immediately after that attack, metal detecters were set up at railway stations in Zhengzhou. And I noticed some Muslim businesses disappearing from the streets.
Samsung very quickly went from a popular product with consumers to an also ran.
It seems odd to ignore this as a factor in Samsung's decision making.
Seriously though, I acknowledge and thank you for your opinion, but respectfully disagree.
They aren't paying "higher than local average" out of the goodness of their hearts. If they were, shareholders wouldn't be too happy.
An anecdote: There’s a really good book called China Inc. that has a story about a belt manufacture in America. The American executive tours a belt manufacture in China one day. He sees that all of the leather hides that have blemishes are being used whereas he would have to discard them. The Chinese factory had so many workers that were paid so little, they could afford to pay someone to cut out small, even tiny patches of leather, and glue them into the blemishes of the belts. It hit the guy so hard that he decided then and there to close his factory in America and move it to China.
An anecdote: There’s a really good book called China Inc. that has a story about a belt manufacture in America. The American executive tours a belt manufacture in China one day. He sees that all of the leather hides that have blemishes are being used whereas he would have to discard them. The Chinese factory had so many workers that were paid so little, they could afford to pay someone to cut out small, even tiny patches of leather, and glue them into the blemishes of the belts. It hit the guy so hard that he decided then and there to close his factory in America and move it to China.
https://www.slashgear.com/samsung-galaxy-foldable-screen-tec...
Apple was invited to visit Xerox in exchange for pre-IPO stock purchase rights. Xerox's management didn't know the value of what they had and willingly gave it away.
Japanese companies outsourced to them, and basically trained their competitors.
Manufacturing in Korea during the 90s just accelerated the rate of IP theft.
It was like that in Japan during the 80s too.
I wonder which country will be after China.
Nobody would come to the conclusion to call that IP theft though.
This is how it works. Countries without technology steal it from those that do. It's basically a market force- if you don't make it available at something approaching a reasonable cost then it will be duplicated through research or just directly stolen.
The two countries were still enemies at the time and on the verge of war. If I recall my history correctly, the trade routes collapsed when Britain stopped selling America textiles, stopped buying American cotton and then tried to blockade the entire country.
Yes stealing the loom filled a void in the American market, but in this case Britain isn't exactly blameless.
It wasn't really the same market forces that we see today, unless I'm missing something. China's not stealing IP to fill any market void.
See Patent Dispute.
I’m not saying US does this as much as China. It would be hard as US is the tech leader in many fields.
But whenever US is not a tech leader they happily engage in government sanctioned industrial espionage (Not Officially Officially sanctioned but wink and nod whoopsie kind of). Thus the complaints about what China is doing ring hollow.
Translation: what about all the countries that aren't as bad as China?
A certain amount of "whataboutism" is unavoidable if you attempt to make any comparative statments, or believe inductive reasoning is possible.
And so comparing A when done by actors other than X is absolutely critical in determining whether it's actually indeed a bad action, or whether I'm simply clouded by bias and calling it bad because of my dislike of X.
In searching Google Trends it's somewhat unsurprising to find that 'whataboutism' as a term didn't even really exist until around 2017 [1] when partisan driven bias and antagonism started to exponentially skyrocket. It's quite an insidious term since it helps deflect potentially logical critique of irrational views, but has a paradoxical connotation of legitimacy and intellectual authenticity.
[1] - https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=w...
I hope you see the irony (hypocrisy?) in this statement.
Yes, aka "putting things in perspective" and "not doing one-sided criticism"...
Why don't all these whatabouters don't just let us blame whoever we want, and keep mum for shit ourselves or our friends did/do?
However, India doesn't seem to have learned to use this model, as is evident from decades of buying foreign weapons without learning to make them ourselves.
China built its military industrial complex by copying Russia. The only thing India has copied so far is an anti-materiel rifle.
Frontline: Coming From Japan [The Fall Of The US Television Industry] (1992) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aesJTsZqm6c and sadly now paywalled article https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1990/09/30/j...
"September 30, 1990. HOW DID Japan destroy the American television industry? The secret history of that strategy reveals how Japanese manufacturers and the Japanese government first created an anti-competitive cartel ..."
Or did you just mean stolen resources?
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a...
It's the source of the rockets red glare.
Now, stop making stuff up to rationalize China's IP theft.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-southkorea-japan-laborers...
Also remember that most Korean forced laborers were forced to work in mines and factories on the ground level, not weren't brought in to develop their products or run their businesses.
American chemical industry got a significant push when they received German chemistry patents during WW1.
Because China is an authoritarian regime that imprisons, and sometimes kills, people for their opinions.
Because China systematically destroyed one of the oldest and most peaceful cultures the world has ever seen in Tibet.
Because China put 100's of 1000's of Muslims in concentration camps. A program which is still happening by all (non Chinese government) accounts.
And so on.
Not that Apple makes decisions based on moral considerations.
And the bail system where poor people can be held for not having money to post bail is akin to decentralized concentration camps around the country. That you can say is a stretch, but you get the point.
Sure. And the Chinese govt's surveillance apparatus is that much scarier for operating in such (relatively) plain sight. We are getting into actual specifics now, which is not the purpose of the thermonuclear take I posted above. As I said, two things can be bad at the same time. It seems I'm better-informed than the average person about the various Badnesses of the Chinese government, but that probably says more about the people I hang out with than anything else. That said, the sudden uptick in the last few months of China-as-boogeyman in media and the conversation of Westerners has me watching with a kind of sick fascination.
I save the thermonuclear take for when someone appears essentially misinformed and is just repeating whatever Bloomberg article they read last. Spratly Islands? Meh, it's called the South China Sea for a reason.
Sometimes you just want to hit the big red launch button and point out that in fact, the Chinese and US governments can probably find some common ground. Where? Well, in their prolific torturing, maiming, and murdering of innocent Muslims over the last decade or two... ^^;
Cash bail should be abolished, but there is absolutely nothing in common between the Chinese government's treatment of the Uighur minority and the practice. There's literally a clause directly targeting this in the 8th Amendment, which has been enforced by the courts at various times to reduce bail. No such recourse is available to inmates of Chinese concentration camps. And the 4th Amendment, which the courts actually enforce, guarantees that you can't be thrown in jail without probable cause to begin with.
But it's hard to take the argument that it's worse than China seriously.
If the criteria is to not have destroyed another culture, then there aren't a lot of countries to manufacture in.
That said, there are plenty of countries that haven't done anything approaching the scale of what China did in Tibet in the last few decades.
It wasn't some Hollywood "paradise" like most people believe.
I'm legitimately curious if evil is struck throughout 'both' sides in any situation ...
The reality is that they are the same as everyone else.
Being Tibetan means something very different than it meant prior to 1959.
People practice their religion openly.
Not according to Wikipedia:
"In 2011 the Tibetan population was three million.[33] The ethnic Tibetans, comprising 90.48% of the population,[34] mainly adhere to Tibetan Buddhism and Bön, although there is an ethnic Tibetan Muslim community."
Also not according to my personal experience. I've never been to the Tibetan Autonomous Region, but I have been to an ethnically Tibetan part of Sichuan, and you certainly see a majority of people who look Tibetan, people speak the Tibetan language, taxi drivers ask if you don't mind if they stop and pray at Tibetan Buddhist shrines along the road, restaurants serve yak butter tea, and so on. There's simply no way to claim that Tibetan culture is gone or even endangered.
So why does it mean that they should be impoverished or that it’s morally wrong to contribute to their economic development?
This what this piece of news highlights, really.