Apple for the first time makes a top-of-the-line iPhone model in India
m.economictimes.com
m.economictimes.com
This is potentially one of those events and has the potential to catalyze high end devices manufacturing in India leading to other second order effects of expertise in other hardware manufacturing. Looking forward to the innovation and confidence this unlocks.
The Jio piece posted here a few days ago (stratechery, I think) made a point of Indian national pride, control, and home-grown expertise playing a large role.
Is that the case with new businesses generally?
Vodafone knows something about this.
Because the fundamental nature of Indian politicians is socialist and statist.
That seems to have changed significantly now, after all a right-wing party has been in power since 2014. It seems to fit well with a lot of the private sector, and it did open up many entrepreneurship schemes too.
IT outsourcing giants are now obsolete - thanks to American recovery in software through cloud computing platform companies like AWS.
>This is potentially one of those events and has the potential to catalyze high end devices manufacturing in India leading to other second order effects of expertise in other hardware manufacturing
I don't think it will change much. All high level process engineers will be Chinese in foxcons new plant. Workers will learn a few process but foxconn factories usually have very high level of automation. I don't expect much technology transfer in this.
Well, Foxconn itself started as a backyard operation making injected plastic parts, so who knows.
Considering that it’s run by Foxconn, who have significant experience in production and a reputation, i doubt there’s going to be much.
Also, as a phone assembly facility, it doesn’t make the same environmental damage that a coal fired power plant, or a steel manufacturing plant might have.
Largest Indian imports is petroleum and also India has largest petroleum refinieries, removing them will he help pollution.
India should focus on renewables and nuclear power and ban petroleum products before going after Chinese electronics. But I think they'll not do it because it will hurt oil companies which are biggest benefactors of political parties.
I predict a lot of production will move out of China because the USA will shift to a protectionist model in the next few years.
Apple is hedging against the same prediction.
This is being done to satisfy India's government so Apple can sell phones in India.
The diversification away from China seems like a nice seide-effect, but it's not assured until the Chennai-region FoxConn factory is running at full speed. Last I heard the Wisconsin FoxConn factory didn't ever make it that far. It's TBD if FoxConn can manage Indian employees.
What do you mean? Apple has been selling phones in India for several years now.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/02/26/apple-ceo-tim-coo...
The big news is that the flagship iPhone 11 will be made in India. This removes a lot of political pressure from Apple.
0: https://www.zdnet.com/article/brazil-is-among-the-worlds-mos...
Nah, they were already doing that, and they seem to have acknowledged that they don't stand a chance against their competitors in a highly price-sensitive market as India. They've barely managed to capture a 2% share in smartphones after all these years and have only recently started to properly localize their offerings in the country. No one in India considers iPhones to be mainstream; they are almost always looked at as luxury smartphones.
I recall Apple India's CEO saying a few years ago that they more intended for India being an exporting hub for iPhones than a target market.
That's a huge savings! If "Made in India" is anything like "Made in China" then it just involves bringing parts from other countries for final assembly, not even necessarily the highest value-add part of manufacturing.
It would be a uniting thing across party lines to rally around hurting the Chinese economy.
On your point of 2025 I don’t think that is quite right since they would need to grow by 150% in 5 years with the US not growing at all (both would be very unprecedented) but the overall point remains.
Yeah, it should be interesting - Biden hasn’t traditionally been as protectionist but it looks like whoever gets elected, globalism has definitely past its peak
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15124510/what-id-do-d...
JB: I would have, just because I don’t accept this proposition that somehow the U.S. cannot handle a heavy-duty manufacturing capacity, that we should shift our focus to service industries. Look at Japan and Germany—their labor costs are as high as ours. Big countries have to be able to make big things. Have to.
Now if it is protectionist, the jobs would NOT go to India but instead ship it from USA (practicality aside but theoretically that is what protectionist meant). Instead, it is Indian/Brazil protectionist plus anti-Communist that is the game here. China is a clear and present threat.
[1] https://www.inc.com/glenn-leibowitz/apple-ceo-tim-cook-this-...
This seems like a great deal for India: threaten a 22% duty, and then you bring in jobs and know-how.
Lots of products have very high duties but you'll not find a single manufacturers of those products within the country.
Those companies simply add import duty to their cost and increase the price of good in local market. This makes products/tool expensive for local people and they are not able to compete globally.
If an America can buy a CNC mill from china duty free and you charge duty which makes $4000 mill cost $7000. Due to higher costs, your local craftman is already rendered uncompetitive in global marketplace
Why not let them buy tools and machines duty free and let them learn skills like CNC machining or metal turning?
The US labor market has long exhibited massive demand for skilled labor, and that's part of the reason that two-thirds of high-school graduates immediately enroll in college. USN&WR lists the US as being perceived fifth in the world for producing skilled workers, behind Japan, Germany, South Korea, and China.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/slideshows/top-10...
American college grads are not typically seeking to work as skilled assembly workers in factories. They might seek to be engineers or project and business managers in those factories, but not the people who assemble the devices.
That requires a large pool of skilled manual labor which the US doesn't produce as much anymore. By contrast, Germany produces a large number of highly skilled vocational workers who supply labor for its high-end manufacturing industry.
Certainly, and that is almost entirely reflective of labor market demand. Workers pursue skills that are pertinent to jobs for which there is labor demand.
Reflow soldering and other electronics manufacturing skills are not particularly grueling to learn, but they don't make as much sense in a diversified postindustrial economy where manufacturing is not the target sector for most workers.
The USA has a larger manufacturing sector than Germany, but manufacturing is a smaller proportion of the American economy (12%) than of the German economy (23%).
https://www.brookings.edu/research/global-manufacturing-scor...
Smartphone shipments in India fell 48% in the second quarter compared with the same period a year ago, the most drastic drop one of the rare growing markets has seen in a decade, research firm Canalys reported Friday evening.
About 17.3 million smartphone units shipped in Q2 2020, down from 33 million in Q2 2019 and 33.5 million in Q1 2020.
...
Apple, which commands only 1% of the Indian smartphone market, was the least impacted among the top 10 vendors as iPhone shipments fell just 20% year-on-year to over 250,000 in Q2 2020.
This could be more along the lines of alarmist chatter but should the US get a new President China's best opportunity to act on some of its threats to Hong Kong and Taiwan is after February 2021. Guarantee they took the lesson to heart about how Crimea and Ukraine were handled with effectively little more than hash tag diplomacy.
The cynic in me would suppose that the move is merely in case there is a backlash against anything “made in China” by western consumers/governments, but maybe Apple really are trying to reduce dependence on China or just cut costs.
In China I expect Apple to be just as craven as ever.
India has its own atrocities with Kashmir, Pakistan, recently Nepal, and their discriminatory Citizensip policy.
US international corporate taxation works like this if you repatriate profits to dividend to shareholders: 1) First pay taxes on profits in each country the profits were made.
2) Out of the remainder pay state corporate income tax in the US state you are headquartered in.
3) out of remainder pay federal corporate income tax.
4) out of remainder shareholder pays state income tax.
5) out of remainder shareholder pays federal dividend tax.
Typically the shareholder is able to keep about 30-40% of their share of the original profits after they go through the five layers of taxation.
And you can see they are very vocal about it, If they are sold in X, they should be taxed in X.
The problem with current Profits based system is that it allows Apple X to paid Apple Ireland 99% of your profits as IPR, Brand / Logo usage ( Apple France paying to Apple Ireland ). Effectively leaving only 1% of the profits being taxed in X.
And there is no way to determine the proper value of those IPR. Apple spends tens of billions every year on R&D and Marketing. So not paying for those IPR would be wrong, but also paying no tax in countries is also wrong.
And no one so far has a reasonable solution to fix the current profit transfer problem. And it is a much harder problem with Globalisation.
Secondly, there is a simple and much better solution that would boost everyone’s economies. Stop taxing investment and savings, tax consumption instead.
In the US it would be as simple as taxing capital gains and dividends at higher ordinary income rates, while no longer taxing corporate income at all. That would increase capital for building new businesses, while restoring progressivity to the tax code.
For each iPhone sold in Finland the government gets ~20%. Plenty of countries have a similar system.
E.g., if Apple Finland procures the phone from Apple Inter Co., two separate entities, for USD 499 and sells it for USD 500, the tax would be on the USD 1, i.e., 20 cents, since Apple Finland would get the VAT paid to Apple Inter Co offset by the Finnish tax authorities.
VAT is charged on the sale price of every intermediary, however businesses can claim back VAT on their purchases. In your example, Apple Inter Co. would sell the iPhone to Apple Finland for $499 + $119.76 (VAT in Finland is 24%). Apple Finland would pay $618.76, claim back $119.76, and sell the phone for $500 + $120 to the consumer, charging the consumer $620 and giving $120 to the government.
So yes, Apple Finland will have given effectively about 20 cents to the government, but the total $120 of VAT will still be paid and calculated on the end sale price, not the profit margin.
And in reality when I said something similar to those that support "revenue tax" ( Whatever that means ) their counter argument are:
>Apple is not paying VAT, the consumer are paying for it.
>VAT is VAT, it is different. Apple needs to paid revenue tax.
If you think these are some random people comments, I have had a journalist at a reputable newspaper gave me roughly similar response as above....
This has nothing to do with what kind of tax it is.
If the company lacks competition then the price they can charge is the total value of the product to the customer. In that case any kind of tax is going to get paid by the company, because the customer won't pay any more than they already do or it's not worth buying the product anymore.
If the company is in a competitive market then they have thin margins and any tax is going to be paid by the customer because the company has no choice but to pass it on or go out of business.
If the company has some competition but not very rigorous (i.e. like Apple) then some of the tax is paid by the company and some by the customer, but it still doesn't matter what kind of tax it is.
> VAT is VAT, it is different. Apple needs to paid revenue tax.
This is just inaccurate. VAT and "revenue tax" are effectively equivalent. They may differ in some implementation details but not in anything fundamental.
I mean VAT is a type of revenue tax, sure. However it is rather uniform and generally it's rate is not affected, e.g. by the total revenue of a business, the type of business, and other such qualities.
It's very easy to just shift the burden to the customer, not only due to the above but also because there's general understanding in the population (which visibly see the government set that tax uniformly on all their receipts).
But there's typically also additional taxation on corporate income. Isn't that essentially the "revenue tax" people meant?
Neither are most corporate income taxes. Otherwise the company would use many small corporations instead of one larger one (which they already do to varying extents for other reasons) and avoid the higher rates.
And, of course, the type of business can easily be taken into account with VAT if you like that sort of thing.
> It's very easy to just shift the burden to the customer
It's not any easier or harder than anything other way. Again, if they had thin margins, they have no choice but to raise prices or go out of business, so they raise prices and the customer pays. If they have higher margins they may (or may not) eat some of the tax because the reduction in demand from raising prices might cost them more than paying the tax would. That's the primary consideration in practice, not what you call the tax or whether the customer sees it on their bill.
In some cases the customer may end up paying more than the amount of the tax because the business has to pass on the tax, which reduces demand, which lowers the sales volume they have to amortized fixed costs over, which requires them to raise prices even more.
Though whether the customer sees it on their bill certainly affects the politics of it, because then they notice that they could be the one paying it, even though that was true either way.
> But there's typically also additional taxation on corporate income. Isn't that essentially the "revenue tax" people meant?
It is, the problem with "income" is that it doesn't have a jurisdiction. If you make sales, the customers are somewhere. If you hire employees, the employees are somewhere. If you own property, the property is somewhere. If you make "profit" it's just numbers in a bank's computer, which can be anywhere, so it goes wherever the taxes are lowest without regard to where anything tangible is.
So if you don't want that to happen you have to tax the thing that actually happens in your jurisdiction, and we're back to VAT or payroll tax or whatever.
It doesn’t in New Zealand - or at least it didn’t up until 2019.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/23/apple-paid-no-...
"A tax agreement between New Zealand and Australia sees dual claims on income tax default to where the company is controlled."
Worldwide, Corporate tax rates by country range between 5-55%, but typically are between 20-30%.
US Corporate tax rate is now 20%.
State corporate tax rates range from zero (NV) to 10%.
State income tax rates range from zero to 11%.
Federal dividend rates range from 15-20%.
Using the the best case scenario (no state income or corporate tax, foreign corporate tax of 5%) gives a total effective tax rate of 35%.
Using more typical rates (8% state income/corporate, 25% foreign) produces a total tax rate of 58%.
So looks like I was pessimistic, probably because my from memory numbers didn’t include Trump tax cut.
But a worst case scenario (France 35%, CA 9%, Dividend 20%) still produces a 65% total effective tax rate.
The government is not a charity (indeed, Apple HQ’s government uses some fraction of their tax revenues to conduct mass murder) and to argue that anyone is immoral for not paying more tax than is specified by the law is an argument against the rule of law in society.
If you don’t like the laws, take it up with your lawmakers, or with the concept of representative government or democracy in general, NOT those who explicitly comply with the law, and indeed spend millions on staff (and their payroll taxes) to ensure that they do.
It absolutely does not. Tax revenues (“local money”) are based on the law and the law alone.
It’s simply not “local money” if the law does not describe it belonging to that local jurisdiction. The concept of ownership and rights to money are legal ones, and the cash flows are flowing according to the law.
You may argue that it goes against the spirit of the idea of tax, but that is simply not documented anywhere and thus could not be complied with precisely even if someone wanted to.
Don’t criticize people for obeying the law as written, and certainly don’t criticize them for not voluntarily donating to organizations that like to use their resources to run torture camps and bomb children.
Corporations are people right?
Assumption of facts not in evidence.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/29/us/mackenzie-scott-billio...
Corporations have way more money than the rest of is in politics for just this reason.
Because, as you say, at the end of the day companies will seek to lower their costs.
Wikipedia:
>The Court held that the free speech clause of the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for political communications by corporations, including nonprofit corporations, labor unions, and other associations.
It may take a constitutional amendment to fix it though.
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"Meanwhile, the educational, information and intellectual commons have been plundered more than at any time in history. Thomas Jefferson, a founding father of the US Constitution, correctly said, ‘Ideas, in nature, cannot be made the subject of property.’ Sadly, that is precisely what has been done in the neo-liberal era.
A globalised intellectual property rights system was immensely strengthened by TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) passed through the World Trade Organisation in 1994, shaped by a few US multinationals, backed by the US and UK governments. This has facilitated the commercialisation, privatisation and colonisation of ideas. Since 1994, the annual filing of patents has more than tripled, with the global stock of patents close to 12 million, each giving monopolistic control of some idea for 20 years or more.
Many patents result from publicly-funded research, diminishing the risk. But TRIPS allows corporations to receive monopolistic income for two decades, or use the patent to block others from producing something. Those claiming to believe in free markets should have opposed the trend, but reveal their class-based ideology by keeping quiet. There is evidence that the patent system hinders economic growth and innovation. It merely increases inequality and rentier capitalism."
[1] https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/plunder-commons-...
A large portion of the price of most goods and services consists of embedded rents on “intellectual property.” Tom Peters, in The Tom Peters Seminar, argued that the cost of materials probably accounted for some $60 of the total price of his new Minolta camera, and that he paid “the rest, about $640, for its intellect....” He went on to celebrate the portion of economic value made up of “intellect” and “imagination.”33 Whether Peters' estimate is typical for the portion of the price of manufactured goods made up of rents on IP is doubtful. But in an economy with no property rights in software and product design, with competition unrestricted by "intellectual property" claims of any kind, whatever portion of a product's price was made up of rent on the ownership of designs or ideas—as opposed to labor and materials—would evaporate overnight.
IP is a major legal support to oligopoly, since so many cartels were stabilized by the exchange or pooling of patents between the major players in various industries (e.g. G.E. And Westinghouse in home appliances, the Bell Patent Association as the basis for AT&T, RCA as a patent pooling arrangement for the major radio producers, etc.).
If IP were abolished, there would be no legal barrier against many small companies producing competing modular components or accessories for the same platform, or even big companies producing modular components designed for interoperability with other companies products. That means that IP is an important legal bulwark not only for planned obsolescence, but also for a business model based on selling cheap platforms and then charging an enormous markup to a captive market for accessories. If you've ever remarked on how expensive toner cartridges or glucometer testing strips are, you can thank “intellectual property” for it.
It's odd that the so-called “Free Trade Agreements” promoted by so many professed “free traders” focus so disproportionately on provisions for stricter enforcement of patents and copyrights. IP plays exactly the same protectionist role for global corporations that tariffs did for the old national industrial economies. Patents and copyrights are barriers, not to the movement of physical goods, but to the diffusion of technique and technology. The one, as much as the other, constitutes a monopoly of productive capability. “Intellectual property” enables the transnational corporation to benefit from the moral equivalent of tariff barriers, regardless of where it is situated. In so doing, it breaks the old link between geography and protectionism. With an American tariff on a particular kind of good, the corporations producing that good have a monopoly on it only within the American market. With the “tariff” provided by a patent on the industrial technique for producing that good, the same corporations have an identical monopoly in every single country in the world that adheres to the international patent regime. “Intellectual property,” just as much as the tariff, is a form of protectionism in that it restricts the right to produce a given good for a particular market area to a privileged class of firms."
Source: http://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Political-Economy...
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Your argument that patent systems already existed does nothing to critique the systems, or the dynamics of the systems, themselves. Instead of accepting things on face value or because an authority has made a claim, I am trying instead to find out the story of how it came to be.
I am not arguing that we should not have any system at all. I strongly disagree however that the existing systems are as harmless as you make them out to be. When you say it "just standardized some aspects" it brushes under the rug any nuance of the underlying mechanics of these systems.
Critiquing something is not denying positives. Please point out where I said that? That is not my intention. I would say that critiquing without providing an alternative is about sharing grief [1], than it is about discussing, planning and creating alternatives. I think you've given me the opportunity to reflect on my approach and message.
I am for systemic evolution and integration: technology shapes us, and we shape technology, it's a spiral.
Promoting intellectual property rights while at the same time talking about 'free markets' is one of the most harmful and backward Doublespeak going on in today's system I think.
The systemic components and dynamics that are part of the intellectual property systems are ripe for evolution. I believe we are living with a pre-21st century systemic reality that doesn't account for the new opportunities available to us due to digital technology.
The reality is that there is a world out there with people who are suffering at the bottom of the corporate pyramids (the Precariat, e.g. gig workers - who have no job security, no benefits, and not many prospects of a peaceful retirement). Then there are also the hundreds of millions suffering in so called 'developing' countries whose resources are plundered and whose governments compete for industrial-production contracts with our corporatocracy [2][3], creating continuous race-to-the-bottom dynamics that squash workers' rights and create environmental catastrophes.
Commons-based peer production integrates our new digital technology abilities, and it has to be our future. Firm/corporate production is wasteful and destructive. Imagine if all phones and gadgets were modular, including the software inside. Instead our gadgets today become slow non-backwards compatible bricks because of perceived obsolescence. I can do without Siri, or the gaming capabilities of the latest flagship phone... or multitasking, or whatever other corporate feature I do not have a choice whether to run or not.
Because of the monopoly created by the idea of exclusive intellectual property (and the systems constructed to support it), many of these useful ideas and technologies lie locked up inside corporate databases, unexplored and unused. What a waste. What a cosmic joke and tyranny.
My belief is that by using technologies like Ceptr and MetaCurrency's Holochain, we can be in a large scale transition to Commons-based peer production, where we might be able to reverse climate change in just a few years.
The technologies that can save us are here today, yet the intellectual property regime keeps them artificially scarce.
The big constraint underneath all of this, though, is our dogmatic ideas around wealth and money:
1. The current political economy is based on a false idea of material abundance. We call it pseudo-abundance. It is based on a commitment to permanent growth, the infinite accumulation of capital and debt-driven dynamics through compound interest. This is unsustainable, of course, because infinite growth is logically and physically impossible in any physically constrained, finite system.
2. The current political economy is based on a false idea of “immaterial scarcity.” It believes that an exaggerated set of intellectual property monopolies—for copyrights, trademarks and patents—should restrain the sharing of scientific, social and economic innovations. Hence the system discourages human cooperation, excludes many people from benefiting from innovation and slows the collective learning of humanity. In an age of grave global challenges, the political economy keeps many practical alternatives sequestered behind private firewalls or unfunded if they cannot generate adequate profits.
So my hope is that I can continue dreaming and imagining a world where humans have a non-violent and harmonious relationship with the Great Mother, where we’ve moved to a closed loop resource economy, where all outputs can become new inputs, where nothing is wasted. A world where everything is modular and where the scarcity of our intellectual property systems have become inverted and lead to a rich Copyleft world instead, where intelligence is pushed to the edges.
[1] https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/478/the-geography-of-s...
Maybe they'll just keep the change instead.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/12/21217060/foxconn-wisconsi...
To this specific case: it's probably to avoid the 22% import duty that India places on products not assembled locally. I suppose the US could pass a similar law.
* The scene where the plant operators from China dump a bunch of waste improperly
* The scene where the plant owner is worried about unionization (though the film contrasts this with the presence of unions in their Chinese plant)
* The scene where the plant operators are complaining that the american workers output with higher defect rate and lower speed
* The scene where the operators are complaining about the strict safety regulations and the fact that Americans like to take time off on weekends
That the plant owner spent tens of thousands of dollars to redo the factory layout is just one example, but it's not more than a few minutes of airtime compared to the quality control and union stories. If these can be put under the umbrella of "cultural differences" then I agree with your assessment.
A question that's asked very early when thinking about a new product is the average selling price for the product (ASP). I believe that there are teams who specialize in generating various permutations of brand, product name, feature sets and price. This is fed to a study group and the choices made by the study group can be analyzed to make accurate predictions like "We can sell 12% more units if we drop the ASP from 899 to 849".
Because the ASP constrained to a very narrow range early in the product development process, all other costs are also constrained to a very narrow range even before real development begins. Important to my answer are BOM (bill of materials) and assembly costs.
The assembly costs are easy to understand: because of minimum wage requirements, healthcare costs and all that (can someone please link me to a full list of costs?), American labor is several times more expensive than competing labor in China or India. However, in the context of assembling a phone, improved training/skills/language abilities in America does not make American labor that much more productive. American labor's productivity can also not benefit from better tooling/automation - China can easily replicate similar tooling/automation improvements and cancel out American labor's advantages.
The BOM costs are a little more interesting. A single factory in China is probably manufacturing products for several American firms simultaneously. Imagine a factory manufacturing various types of phone chargers. They all likely source the same components (screws, capacitors, glue, packaging materials) from the same vendors - so a screw manufacturer (for example) who has a factory 2 miles away can send a shipment of screws to this assembly plant every day, and the screws will get used by all the American brand products being manufactured in that factory. Chinese factories have built up an incredible network of such suppliers around them. Often, if you are manufacturing a product, you can go ask the Chinese factory who will assemble your product for advice on which suppliers/vendors to use to save on BOM costs. They are happy to help.
If Apple were to make iPhones in America, the first and second challenges they will face will be the cost of labor and having to build up a deep supply chain that will feed into their American factories.
At such high costs, apple (or anyone) will conclude that they can not meet their profit margins at the desired ASP and scrap the entire product.
A friend of mine made the point to me the other day, correctly I think, that it's very difficult to compete on price when your competitor is using slave labor. If I own a company that makes 5 products, and 1 of those 5 involves slave labor, I'm getting free work that I can amortize across all 5 products. So, even if a particular product does not involve slave labor, I can still sell it for cheaper if slave labor expands my margins somewhere else.
In a world where ASP and margins are the only criteria, forced labor camps like those found in Xinjiang make business sense. This suggests to me that maybe the "it's just business" mentality is neither ethical nor long-term sustainable, and can incentivize unlawful behavior.
Or more than that?
The article also covers it immediately.
(Only reading the headline isn’t laziness... that’s like saying browsing library bookshelves without reading each book cover-to-cover as you go is laziness...)
If you care that much, you can look up the information within seconds.
Apple even has this nice feature where you click on a word and it lets you look it up immediately.
Telling me that it’s in Chennai, gives me much more information than simply saying India because I know where Chennai is located
And even if I didn’t know, i appreciate the more specific information in the title, which implies the missing information.
Now that the title says India, I need to exert more effort to find the city.
So, does anyone feel like an Ugly American yet?
“Don’t tell me it’s in Milan, tell me it’s in Italy”
Although at least this headline is fully honest and not misleading, so kudos there.
So give us more credit! :)
I think you may have pulled up NYC's metro area population and compared it to the urban population of Chinese cities. The metro population of large Chinese cities is in the 20-40 million.
1. Tokyo - 37M
2. Delhi - 29M
3. Shanghai - 26M
4. São Paulo - 22M
5. Mexico City - 22M
6. Cairo - 20M
7. Mumbai - 20M
8. Beijing - 20M
9. Dhaka - 20M
10. Osaka - 19M
NYC is next at #11 with 19M.
However, if you count strictly by "city proper" (as defined by a very wide range of administrative agglomerations), there are indeed THIRTEEN cities in China larger than NYC. I'm not sure this is a hugely useful metric, however, as economically-relevant city boundaries aren't truly represented by administrative lines of control.
[0]: https://population.un.org/wup/Publications/Files/WUP2018-Hig...
But the main thing : Paris is much more famous than Chennai.
Most people around here probably know already but there's always one or two that will have their life improved a lot I think.
It isn’t technically wrong but usually the inventor/creator is credited regardless of who they paid to assemble it.
The Indian people are doing this voluntarily at the direction of Foxconn who is doing this voluntarily at the direction of Apple.
I'm sure we can go higher than just Apple as well.