Apple have taken steps to minimize the ability of competitors to duplicate their business advantage. There’s a great post here on Quora describing how Apple has used its supply chain as a competitive advantage and how competitors end up subsidizing Apple’s use of the technology. But the approach of “locking in” key new technology so nobody else can get them works best in a world where consumers need more performance from their devices — a world is rapidly slipping away.
So, what’s Apple got to do? In so much as it is able to trust its suppliers of key components not to become competitors, it can continue to use them. But where it can’t, or where those suppliers have already become competitors, it has only one sensible choice — replace them. It has two choices here: the first (and obvious one) is with another supplier. But that risks the same thing happening all over again — Apple nursing another supplier into a competitor. The second choice: for components and services that are critical to maintaining competitive advantage in the markets which Apple plays, Apple needs to build the components themselves.
Most companies wouldn’t be in a position do that. But Apple is almost already there. I also hear that there might be a country out there with relatively high unemployment rate, looking for some jobs to be brought back home. Funnily enough, it seems that’s just what Tim Cook is doing right now. This approach might just be a good way of on-shoring some of those untaxed offshore profits (I imagine the tax benefits for building a few factories in the US would be quite high), all the while taking away business from competitors — both current and future.
But there’s one question that still remains. In the instance of the threat that Samsung poses to Apple: is it already too late?
About five years ago, Apple (AAPL) design guru Jony Ive decided he wanted a new feature for the next MacBook: a small dot of green light above the screen, shining through the computer’s aluminum casing to indicate when its camera was on. The problem? It’s physically impossible to shine light through metal.
Ive called in a team of manufacturing and materials experts to figure out how to make the impossible possible, according to a former employee familiar with the development who requested anonymity to avoid irking Apple. The team discovered it could use a customized laser to poke holes in the aluminum small enough to be nearly invisible to the human eye but big enough to let light through.
Applying that solution at massive volume was a different matter. Apple needed lasers, and lots of them. The team of experts found a U.S. company that made laser equipment for microchip manufacturing which, after some tweaking, could do the job. Each machine typically goes for about $250,000. Apple convinced the seller to sign an exclusivity agreement and has since bought hundreds of them to make holes for the green lights that now shine on the company’s MacBook Airs, Trackpads, and wireless keyboards.
Apple began innovating on the nitty-gritty details of supply-chain management almost immediately upon Steve Jobs’s return in 1997. At the time, most computer manufacturers transported products by sea, a far cheaper option than air freight. To ensure that the company’s new, translucent blue iMacs would be widely available at Christmas the following year, Jobs paid $50 million to buy up all the available holiday air freight space, says John Martin, a logistics executive who worked with Jobs to arrange the flights. The move handicapped rivals such as Compaq that later wanted to book air transport. Similarly, when iPod sales took off in 2001, Apple realized it could pack so many of the diminutive music players on planes that it became economical to ship them directly from Chinese factories to consumers’ doors. When an HP staffer bought one and received it a few days later, tracking its progress around the world through Apple’s website, “It was an ‘Oh s—’ moment,” recalls Fawkes.
That mentality—spend exorbitantly wherever necessary, and reap the benefits from greater volume in the long run—is institutionalized throughout Apple’s supply chain, and begins at the design stage. Ive and his engineers sometimes spend months living out of hotel rooms in order to be close to suppliers and manufacturers, helping to tweak the industrial processes that translate prototypes into mass-produced devices. For new designs such as the MacBook’s unibody shell, cut from a single piece of aluminum, Apple’s designers work with suppliers to create new tooling equipment. The decision to focus on a few product lines, and to do little in the way of customization, is a huge advantage. “They have a very unified strategy, and every part of their business is aligned around that strategy,” says Matthew Davis, a supply-chain analyst with Gartner (IT) who has ranked Apple as the world’s best supply chain for the last four years.