Apple thrived in China while Google and Facebook failed because it focused on hardware instead of content services that get censored. An Apple executive watched Terry Guo point to a garbage field that would become an iPod factory in weeks, showing the speed and scale China could deliver.
Chapters
Apple managed to succeed in China where so many other western companies, Google, Facebook, even Amazon struggled or failed. That's a rare story in tech. What did Apple do differently in China that allowed it not just to survive but to thrive when so many others didn't?
Some of the companies that didn't do well in China did so because they're involved with services. Google, Facebook, that's content and that gets heavily censored by the Chinese Communist party. And to be honest, Apple has not succeeded where they. In other words, iTunes store does not exist. Apple TV does not exist. You can't have third party apps even like ChatGPT that do AI that are Western and that's not Apple. But Apple embeds OpenAI into some of its features. So they've succeeded in a different way. I would say it's not that Apple succeeded in China where others failed. It's that Apple saw something in China that other builders of hardware didn't see. Most builders of hardware looked at China in early 2000s and saw scale possibilities and low cost, high margin for them. Apple saw China and understood that there were unconstrained design potential. That everything Jony I've wanted to do was made possible by ubiquitous labor, hard working labor, dynamic labor in China, and an ability to build factories basically custom made for Apple just at an enormous quantity. And more than that, so, so quickly I have stories in the book where an Apple executive is looking at a field of garbage while Terry Guo says there's your ipod factory and the Apple executive's having like a panic attack because he doesn't realize just how quickly a factory can go from literally piles of dirt and garbage to up and running with tens of thousands of workers inside. Apple really did sort of unlock the potential of what was available in China, but they did so in combination with Foxconn and Terry Guo. And it's the meeting of those two companies that really results in the iPhone and the world's most valuable company.
