The company spent two decades and billions of dollars building a supply chain of unprecedented sophistication. Now, a reckoning is coming
Apple built up a supply and manufacturing operation of such complexity, depth and cost that the company’s fortunes have become tied to China in a way that cannot easily be unwound.
Patrick McGee in San Francisco In 2007, Nokia had 900mn users. Its market dominance seemed so great that Forbes ran a cover story on the company asking “Can anyone catch the cell phone king?” The same year, Apple launched the iPhone. Sixteen years and 1.2bn users later, the story of how the Finnish handset maker got blindsided by the iPhone is well known. Nokia, the story goes, didn’t have enough software savvy to keep up with visionary Apple co-founder Steve Jobs…
