1. How has Apple capitalized on the globalization of production? What advantages does manufacturing in China offer the company?
Hundreds of different parts in the Apple iPhone are designed and manufactured in foreign countries such as Germany, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Europe, Africa, and Asia and then the parts are transferred to the Taiwanese multinational firm, Foxconn, to assemble
Except the lowly labor costs, which occupy a small proportion of the total value of the Apple iPhone, there are three the various advantages. The Chinese subcontractor can respond quickly to being appropriate for requesting from Apple when it wants to scale production up or down. The subcontractor is easy to hire more engineers in China to oversee than to hire the engineers in the U.S., and finally, Apple through the subcontractor can easily find the components for its products since other factories are within close proximity to one another.
2. Why do you think Apple continues to keep activities like product design, software engineering, and marketing in the United States?
I think Apple continues to keep the activities in the United States because it wants to keep the secret of technology, the trade name of a U.S. company for competition, and under the effects of the laws. Nowadays, the global competition is more violent, so the secret of technology and business is kept strictly. Therefore, it is better if it is produced in the motherland in where the company headquarters. Second, the U.S. is still a pioneering country in the software technology, so that helps the company is more competitive on the global market.
Closing Case: Legal Outsourcing
1. What are the benefits to a law firm of outsourcing legal services to a foreign country? What are the potential costs and risks?
The benefits are to lower the payments for a lawsuit, and concurrently, the clients also compel the law firms to find the lower legal costs by means of outsourcing.
The potential costs are common costs of law services. The potential risks are risks of legal businesses when their costs are expensive, but their efficiencies are low. By outsourcing, the legal costs are lower, so they make an opportunity to expand the legal market through the potential costs lower, concurrently, the potential risks of the law firms are minimized.
2. On balance, do you think that this kind of outsourcing is a good thing, or a bad thing? Why?
A good thing is to lower the legal cost, but the efficiency is improved because the legal firm often used the fresh law graduates to do grunt work, low efficiency, but their costs are expensive because the firm always wants to raise its profit. In the case, the clients get more benefits, so the services will increase and be much more common.
A bad thing is the law students are more difficult to find a job after they graduate. They must compete with experienced lawyers who are paid lowlier in other countries. As the textbook, India is a country which has the common law inherited as similarly as the U.S.'s common law, and its education helps students speak English well. Those are two crucial reasons to compete with the U.S. students.
