June Round-Up

If you take a wider view of manufacturing, I hope this brief round up of recent articles you might have missed might be useful to you, especially if you keep an eye on the China front.

You might find this profile in the UK Daily Mail of Taiwan's Terry Gou, CEO of Foxconn/Hon Hai, who have probably made at least one of the items in your house (iPhone? iPad? Dell/HP PC? ) illuminating. It's one of the best insights into how his company is run since Jason Dean's groundbreaking one at the WSJ several years ago.

Over at the site Secret China, which sounds like another conspiracy theorist get-together but actually has a good bank of articles offering insights into lots of aspects of manufacturing in China, there were a couple of good pieces this month, also concerning Foxconn. Former employee Liangshan Shiyan describes his time working for them in a personal way which throws a different light on working conditions and the company's operations. Then this article analyses the reasons behind Gou's extraordinary pay-rise offer to his workers, effectively doubling their pay, and sees it as his response to recent political manoeuvrings, and the government's recent use of the Chinese media, including China Central TV, against him.

As for Foxconn's most famous product, the Apple iPhone, Business Week featured a tear down analysis of its real component costs by market research outfit iSuppli. If an Apple addict starts to bore you over lunch with their new iPhone 4's performance, you'll be able to give a breakdown of what that performance costs to assemble. The phone's Samsung chip itself is just $10, for example.

I posted recently on an interview with Zhang Zin on CNN, and the UK Telegraph had a profile of her today too (spelling her name Zhang Xin). She doesn't do evening business dinners or weekends, and considers first class travel a waste of money. Given her status as one of the world's richest women, she might be on to something.

Finally, and taking a break from the China theme at long last, I was intrigued by a review of a luxury specialist car manufacturer's re-creation of the Willy's jeep in the NYT. At $80k and upwards, it's a niche product for sure, especially as it's assembled in LA. But what really caught my attention was the source of the sheet metal work- the Philippines! Even at that price they couldn't find a specialist metal basher more locally...?!

Hope you find something in the above worth following up.