Case study steve jobs

Apple has become one of the best-known, most admired and most imitated companies on earth, in part through an unrelenting mastery of global operations. 2 There are risks and rewards for all in a global economy. The globalization of human capital results in a range of winners and losers around the world: companies and their stockholders, consumers, contractors, firms up and down the supply chain, employed people, and unemployed people, as well as their economies. In February 2011, President Obama asked Apple’s Steve Jobs why Apple could not bring back all the jobs it used to provide in the United States. The jobs related to most high-tech products made by companies such as Dell, HP, and Apple have now migrated overseas, including those for Apple’s 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads, and 59 million other products sold in 2011. Breaking down the retail price of $500 for Apple’s iPhone, for example, Time magazine estimates that $61 worth of value comes from Japan, with its high-end technology manufacturing; $30 of value is added from Germany; $23 from South Korea; $7 from Chinese assembly lines; $48 from “unspecified”; and $11 from the U.S. Those inputs total $179 for parts and assembly abroad, leaving Apple, the inventor in the U.S., a profit of $321. 3 For the first quarter of 2012, Apple made $13 billion in profit. Although Apple directly employs 43,000 in the U.S. and 20,000 overseas, an additional 700,000 people engineer, build, and assemble iPads, iPhones, and Apple’s other products in Asia and Europe. Sophisticated component parts outsourced in various countries are assembled in China. Some of those are contracted to the Taiwanese-headquartered company Foxconn’s Longhua factory campus in Shenzhen, for example, where over 300,000 employees live in dorms, eat on site, and chum out iPhones, Sony PlayStations, and Dell computers. Foxconn Technology, with 1.2 million employees in plants throughout the country, is China’s largest exporter and assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world's consumer electronics, including for customers such as Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Nintendo, Nokia and Samsung. No other factories in the world have the manufacturing scale Foxconn.

The answer to the President's question is not as simple as the ability to acquire cheaper labor overseas; Apple's executives and those at other high-tech firms claim that "Made in the USA" is not a competitive strategy for them because America does not compare favorably with the industrial skills, hard work, and flexibility that can be found in companies such as Foxconn.