Apple booked 50 business class seats daily for SFO → Shanghai on United in the pre-COVID 19 era They were spending ~$35m per annum to get manufacturing design engineering (MDE) teams from Cupertino to supervise the manufacturing engine in China. They flew everyone from process engineers to designers to operations managers to reliability engineers on-site to help ramp up production of various Apple devices. In fact, United began flying SFO → Chengdu daily from 2015 because Apple guaranteed it would take almost all of the 36 business class seats on that flight. Chengdu is where 50% of the world’s iPads are made! Back in 2019, Apple was United’s largest corporate account. Apple was spending ~$150m per annum with United 🤯 Apple began manufacturing efforts in China in 1997 when Jobs came back into power. Apple’s peak CAPEX in China was ~$55bn per annum. The scale of Apple’s supply chain in China insane: There are 1.4 million employed on production lines by Apple’s manufacturing partners like Foxxconn! Source for the above: Patrick McGee’s book “Apple in China” and Dan Wang’s “Breakneck”. I’ve read both these year & they provide a fascinating POV into China’s manufacturing prowess.