Apple's dominance in China shows how geopolitics and technology are reshaping global business. Traditional risk spreadsheets miss geopolitical threats. Taiwan's control of semiconductor manufacturing is a systemic vulnerability that cost-obsessed companies ignored.
Chapters
We're now living in a world where geopolitics and tech are colliding more than ever. Semiconductors, AI supply chains, TikTok bands. What does Apple's China story teach us about how companies should think about geopolitics when building global businesses?
The book is very much about blind spots because you look at things like on an Excel sheet, you can figure out, you know, who the best suppliers are in terms of your margin, your return on investments. I mean, just a host of things. I don't know what column you put in accidentally up arming America's biggest competitor. If it doesn't fit in an Excel sheet, how do you measure it? So I think about that statement from Peter Drucker all the time. What gets measured is what gets managed. And I just think the book is about the blind spot of something that was absolutely not measured and indeed would have been absurd to measure as recently as 2012. I mean, before Xi Jinping comes in, nobody's thinking of China as the next great rival. If you read accounts of what people, politicians in the US were thinking in the late 90s and early 2000s, at the turn of the century, America's economy was somewhere between 8 and 10 times larger than China's. This was not considered a threat, and in a certain sense I want to say rightly so, except that in 2020 hindsight. So I think there's definitely a message there about geopolitics, but that's probably more obvious now. You can see that in all sorts of things. Semiconductors, the consolidation of all chip production essentially into Taiwan, obviously in retrospect looks like a major problem and it's something that's trying to be addressed. So globally we are understanding that just looking after efficiency is not enough in the supply chain. And I know supply chains sound boring, but they are the nervous system of capitalism. If there's something that's going to be really changing over the next five to 10 years, indeed are already changing. It's that CEOs and the like will be prizing resilience in the supply chain rather than just efficiency if indeed the world ends up being peaceful. But if something goes wrong, then you're gonna, you're gonna be very happy that you prioritize resiliency. So it's a, it's a give and take. It's very difficult. The people that are making these decisions make a hell of a lot more money than I do, and for good reason.
