Before the COVID-19 pandemic , the company sent hundreds of US engineers there each month to work with the contract manufacturers that built most of its products. Apple was spending millions of dollars every year just to fly its people to China.
In 2019, United Airlines made a promotional banner about how valuable Apple was to its business. United wrote that Apple booked fifty business-class seats daily from San Francisco to Shanghai, from which the airline made $35 million each year. Apple used to book 50 business-class seats daily between San Francisco and Shanghai’s Pudong airport. Posters from United Airlines that circulated in Apple was United’s largest corporate account in 2019, with the company spending around $150 million a year with the airline, according to Mathur. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India in 2025, up from 36 million a year earlier, with India accounting for about a quarter of its global iPhone production, Bloomberg reported.
That sounds like there’s no interaction,” Apple CEO Tim Cook once told an interviewer. An excerpt from Dan Wang’s book Breakneck , shared by pre-seed investor Rahul Mathur on X, details the scale of Apple’s travel between California and China. “It wasn’t simply Apple dreaming up new ideas for its manufacturers to execute. Rather, it was a collaborative process between Cuper- tino and Shenzhen. “[Apple products are] not designed and sent over. The idea of having something designed in California and manufactured elsewhere “requires a kind of hand-in-glove partnership. That’s over eighteen thousand business-class seats on one route. Apple’s manufacturing base has expanded in India in recent years.
Apple had sent hundreds of US engineers to China each month before the pandemic to oversee the contract manufacturers that built most of its products, an earlier report from The Wall Street Journal read.
