Apple In China by Patrick McGee

Despite being an early adapter of Apple products, and having read a bit about Steve Jobs and the company itself, I know very little about the business side of the company, and this book is an easy introduction in to what Tim Cook has done for Apple, and what the implications of that are. The author contends that as the world’s first $3 trillion publicly traded company, Apple is an unusual kind of political actor — Apple may have the gross domestic product of a small nation, but it doesn’t have an army; it must play by others’ rules. the book charts Apple’s development into a design and manufacturing powerhouse that is dependent on the profitable relationships and supply chain networks it’s helped create in China, the company’s second-largest consumer market. Apple has sunk hundreds of billions of dollars into Chinese markets. The result was an extraordinary transformation of Apple’s production processes that leveraged China’s cheap labor, poor rule of law and extraordinary economies of scale. This book explores what happened, why it happened and what the implications are going forward.