Economic Times 11TH November 2013

Fun to Use the iPhone, But Not to Make It
How a young man from Nepal — like many others — went to test iPhone 5 lenses and got trapped in Apple’s ruthless supply chain Beneath the spotlight in San Francisco, Apple marketing Chief Phil Schiller was about to stage-manage one of the most anticipated product unveilings of the year. It was the first post-Steve Jobs reveal of a new iPhone. A glowing iPhone 5 came up from beneath the stage. Schiller then pitched the phone’s features, including an 8-MP camera. He said, “The world is just a more beautiful place when you take pictures with iPhone 5.” Offstage, something far more extraordinary was under way. CEO Tim Cook, who had overseen the supply chain for Apple for years, had planned what many called the most aggressive production-and launch schedule ever attempted by Apple. Even though relatively few units had been produced by the time Schiller took the stage on September 12, 2012, the iPhone 5 would go on the market in the US and eight other countries nine days later.

Hunt for Manpower Apple, of course, is a designer, not a builder. The builders, such as Foxconn, get the parts for Apple’s products from suppliers. One of Apple’s top 10 suppliers is Flextronics, a contract manufacturer based in Singapore with about 28 million sq ft of factory space spread across four continents, including a plant south of Kuala Lumpur. That’s where the cameras Schiller raved about would be made. That meant Flextronics had to source an army of people to man factory lines. Usually companies like Flextronics tap an informal, largely unregulated and transnational network of thousands of recruiters. They fan out, often hiring sub recruiters, into the farm fields and impoverished cities of Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam and Nepal. The positions they’re trying to fill are so coveted that