Apple’s headquarters are in Cupertino, Calif. By putting an office in Reno, just 200 miles away, to collect and invest the company’s profits, Apple sidesteps state income taxes on some of those gains.
カリフォルニアの法人税率は8.84%。ネバダは？ ゼロ。
California’s corporate tax rate is 8.84 percent. Nevada’s? Zero.
Setting up an office in Reno is just one of many legal methods Apple uses to reduce its worldwide tax bill by billions of dollars each year.
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リノだけでなく、「世界を股にかけた税減らし」をやっており、事業収益をアイルランドの子会社、オランダ経由で（無税地帯の）カリブ諸国に移転させることで節税を行う「ダブルアイリッシュ＆ダッチサンドイッチ（Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich）」という会計テクニックまで開発したと微に入り細を穿っている。
Fascinating well-researched investigative report by Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher for the New York Times, on the rise of China as a manufacturing power and the corresponding effect on middle class jobs in the U.S., with Apple as the case study. Includes this heretofore unknown (to me, at least) story on the original iPhone’s last-minute change from a plastic to glass display:
In 2007, a little over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to appear in stores, Mr. Jobs beckoned a handful of lieutenants into an office. For weeks, he had been carrying a prototype of the device in his pocket.
Jobs 氏は怒りをあらわにして iPhone がみんなの目に見えるように差し出した。プラスチックスクリーンの表面には無数の小さな引っかきキズが見えた、とその場にいた人間のひとりは語る。それから彼はジーンズのポケットからキーを取り出した。
Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the meeting. He then pulled his keys from his jeans.
People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also carry their keys in their pocket. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”
ひとりの幹部がその場を後にした。そして中国深圳へのフライトを予約した。完璧にしろと Jobs 氏がいうのなら、中国に向かうしかないのだ。
After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to Shenzhen, China. If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere else to go.
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一夜にして 3000 人を雇える
NY タイムズは、元幹部および現幹部たち（後者はもちろん匿名希望）から同じような話を引用している。すなわち、中国は単に安価な製造拠点なのではないのだ、何より重要なのはより機敏で、より柔軟、より対応が早いという点なのだと。
The Times has quotes from former and present (unnamed in the latter case, of course) executives who all paint the same picture: that Chinese manufacturing isn’t merely cheaper, but also perhaps even more importantly, nimbler, more flexible, and faster:
「彼らなら一夜にして 3000 人を雇える」と2010 年までアップルの世界サプライマネージャだった Jennifer Rigoni は（仕事の細部については触れなかったが）語った。「米国の工場で一夜にして 3000 人を雇い、従業員を寮に泊めることを納得させられるそんな工場がアメリカのどこにあるだろうか？」
“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined to discuss specifics of her work. “What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”
Ever since Foxconn CEO Terry Gou told people that the robots are coming, we think the Foxconn workers will go jobless someday. As Foxconn is going to boost the number of robots doing those repetitive tasks on its assembly line in 3 years time, the Foxconn chairman recently talked about the workforce of the company, saying that the management of one million workers gives him headaches.
It’s pretty sad to hear that. Foxconn is currently the largest private-sector employer in China with over one million employees, but the company is pressured by the stresses of rising labor costs and negative media attention over employee suicides. Being the founder and chairman of the company, Gou needs to solve any problems coming out from the factories in mainland China. As everyone is paying attention on the lives of Foxconn workers, Gou must take care the workers, but at the same time, being able to cope with the huge demand of Apple’s super-popular devices. So, the effective solution to stop people calling Foxconn as a sweatshop is to partially replace the company’s human workforce with one million robots, and here’s what Gou was hoping for,
“In the future, we hope designers are able to encode human intelligence into programs, converting the programs into robots’ software brains to match the intelligence of a 18-year-old human,”
maclalala2 