Patrick McGee

I'm going to teach the local homegrown suppliers.

I'm going to teach Huawei and Oppo and Vivo and Xiaomi.

So Apple, in a sense, built up its own competitors who were able to rely on the very competencies that Apple had brought to the country.

My sort of quip about this is that in the West, we often think that Apple killed Nokia, right?

Nokia wasn't able to keep up with multi-touch technology and software, the iOS.

I think it's much more of a hardware story.

But if it's a hardware story, Apple was never big enough to kill Nokia.

Nokia often had 50% penetration in certain markets.

Apple's never had more than 20% globally.

So who killed Nokia?

And the answer is the Chinese competitors that Apple had made so good by building up a supply chain that they could all rely on.

It's such a pessimistic outlook at the end of the book, and it's unfortunately the one that I still have now.

I'm always hoping that some expert is able to shake me out of my pessimism, and I've sort of been asking that adamantly of all sorts of people that I've been meeting over the last six months, and basically just nobody has been able to do it.

And they're not really even trying.

I mean, the more you know about the fields, the more you understand about China's dominance in these sectors and how incapable other places are, not least of which America, but unfortunately India for a host of reasons as well.

So, I mean, look, it's basically, you know, engineers and executives that are working in India on behalf of Apple or its suppliers like Foxconn and Tata that are the ones that are saying, like, this isn't working the way that we need it to, right?

If you talk about India speed, you're not talking about the equivalent of Shenzhen or China speed.

It's unfortunately a pejorative term.

India just doesn't have the same next-door facilities or ecosystems.

They want to have the higher value-added stuff