Apple Spent $60B on 9,000 American Suppliers in 2018, Supporting 450,000 Jobs (macrumors.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Well timed with a report from The New York Times today that explained why Apple is unlikely to manufacture more of its products in the United States, Apple has published a press release highlighting how several components it uses are manufactured by U.S. suppliers such as Finisar, Corning, and Broadcom. Apple says it spent $60 billion with 9,000 American component suppliers and companies in 2018, an increase of more than 10 percent from the year before. Apple says this spending supports more than 450,000 jobs in the United States.

Comments

Apple PR Success

[Luthair]

Notice how we suddenly have multiple articles at the same time about how Apple is great for the economy and how they couldn't possibly manufacture here. The source of these articles couldn't possibly be a PR campaign from Apple about how they're an important US company who contributes domestically despite how hard it is.

60 billion / 450,000

[greythax]

Did I do the math right, that's like $133,000 a job? Wonder what percentage of that makes it to the workers?

Re:60 billion / 450,000

[vux984]

Who knows what their methodology was? Did they disclose it? They could have just summed up the employment figures of all the suppliers they do business with for all I know.

And then maybe added in the knock on employment as well.

For example, a mill or a mine can effectively 'create' a whole town. The mine just pays the mine workers, the mine workers in turn use their salaries for everything from kitchen renovation contractors to haircuts from mcdonalds burgers to daycare for their kids... and the mine takes "credit" for the entire job market of the town. And its not even 'wrong'... because we've all seen a mine close and the town die.

Suppose also that an ore refinery in the next town over has a contract to buy all the ore from that mine for $1 billion a year. It *can* claim that $1 billion is creating all the jobs in the town. And its not "wrong" because its supporting the mine... But you obviously can't just take a dollar amount and divide it by people to figure out an average salary in a calculation like this. A big chunk of that money was paying for the output of the mine itself... the actual ore to refine. And this is of course a super simplistic example.

But the point is there are economic 'models' one can use, and methodologies one can use for estimating how many 'jobs' you create with an investment of size X in an industry Y.

And all kinds of ways of stretching and abusing and oversimplifying those estimates if you just want a good PR puff piece and only care about 'somewhat plausible' vs 'accurate'.

Re:60 billion / 450,000

[viperidaenz]

When you buy an iPhone, most of the money goes to Apple's cash account, sitting off shore waiting for the next tax avoidance scheme to be implemented.
They're up to nearly $300 billion in cash reserves.

Globalism as it should be

[Sarten-X]

In other words, despite what propagandists love to spout, the economy is global, and buying from anywhere creates jobs everywhere. It's stupidly short-sighted to focus on one particular industry in one particular location, because global shipping is so cheap that it's more cost-effective to move parts around than to stand up a local manufacturing process.

Buy parts from country A, built components in B and C, assemble in D, sell to E. Everybody benefits a little bit, and the end result is a product that's cheap enough to be reasonably affordable.