I.

iPhone Production Network:

Sourcing:

Manufacturers at Apple source their materials from all over the world. More than 200
companies around the world manufacture and supply Apple iPhone manufacturers
with the components they need to produce the phones. And the countries where these
manufacturers are located are also widely varied. Components come from companies
in South Korea, China, Taiwan, Germany, Japan, India, and many other countries,
including the United States.

Most of these suppliers send their manufactured components to massive Apple

manufacturing factories around the world for additional manufacturing and
assembly.

Manufacturing:

Manufacturing is the process of making the components that go into the iPhone. While
Apple designs and sells the iPhone, it doesn't manufacture its components. Instead,
Apple uses manufacturers from around the world to make individual parts. The
manufacturers specialize in particular items—camera specialists manufacture the lens
and camera assembly, screen specialists build the display, and so on.
Assembly:

The components manufactured by many companies all around the world are
ultimately sent to just two companies to assemble into iPhones. Those companies are
Foxconn and Pegatron, both of which are based in Taiwan. These Taiwanese firms
manage iPhone production and ensure the completed phones are delivered on time and
with the quality standards Apple demands.

 According to what we have analyzed about the production network of an

Iphone, you can see that Apple has made most of its products outside the US.
Why Apple do that?

The first reason is that there’s way lower labor costs involved. Indeed, one of the
benefits of Western companies manufacturing goods in Asia is that labor costs are
indeed far lower than what they are at home. For instance, skilled workers in China
make about $100 a week, way less than the US offer
But as Jason Dedrick, a professor at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse
University, told The Wall Street Journal, if Apple could find enough workers in one
place to assemble massive amounts of iPhones in the US, the cost per iPhone would
likely increase by about $30 or $40 (a new iPhone starts at $649 in the US), and only a
small part of that would be due to labor.
The real issue is that the vast majority of Apple’s suppliers, the companies that build
the individual components that make up an iPhone—such as the battery, the camera,
the display, the sensors, and just about every other part inside the iPhone—are based
in Asia. Apple has suppliers in 28 countries, and the countries with the highest
concentration of suppliers are China, Japan, and Taiwan, according to MIT
Technology Review. There’s the availability of parts in such Asian countries and the
lack of suitable manufacturing facilities in the US. Shipping all of those individual
parts to the US would cost a lot more than moving them around China or shipping
them across Asia. That convenience saves Apple a lot more money.
Apple undertakes a low-cost approach on an international basis.

II. Product standardization strategy

A product standardization strategy is used when a company treats the whole world as

one market with little meaningful variation. The assumption is that one product can
meet the needs of people everywhere. Nowadays, many business-to-business
companies use the product standardization strategy. And Apple is a typical example

Apple uses a standardization strategy because its products do not have to be

customized for local users. Apple wants to touch a large number of consumers
by proposing a performing, multifunction, easy to use, ergonomic, beautifully
designed product and by being more innovative, to demarcate itself from main
competitors, in particular Samsung, Oppo, Huawei. Therefore, an iPhone will
look the same, wherever you buy it.
In 2013, Apple released two new iPhones, the 5s and the 5c. Those who want the
top notch experience and who are willing to pay for it will get the 5s. Those who
are more money conscious will have the plastic case i.e iPhone 5c. But after
increasing orders of iPhone 5s compared to iPhone 5c, it can be concluded that
they are not required to care about product differentiation at all.

Then, from iPhone 6 released in 2014 to iPhone 11 released in 2019, Apple does
not differentiate its product offering. It proposes only a single product at a time.
Each year, Apple will launch a new type of iPhone with a higher level. You can
see that each level will have something different and being more innovative as
well as having a new design, better features and more surprising functions. But
the foundation that was laid at the start was a solid one that ensured success for the
years to come. Every iPhone would deliver predictably smooth performance, a
recognizable, easy to use interface, a focus on privacy and come with a set of
features that would make it stand out.
Each time releasing a new level of an iPhone, there are very few variants in each
class of products: iPhone is available in some colors; having some memory sizes:
16GB, 32GB & 64GB or 64GB, 128GB & 256GB; different in size ( iPhone and
iPhone plus or iPhone and iPhone max ). This just limits the number of choices the
customer has to choose from and it makes it easy for customer to decide and buy.
The strategy of Apple is still selling iPhone as a standardized product on a global scale

III. Marketing strategy

Apple pursuing a global standardization strategy uses standard marketing

internationally. In other words, it uses the same marketing strategy from one
country to the next, and across various cultures and try not to customize its
marketing strategy to local conditions

We often notice that the market of mobile phones is divided in several groups.
Generally the effective creators on this market use all a differentiated marketing
strategy. So the market of Smartphones is a segmented market with companies
providing smartphones by targeting people of different tastes. For example,
marketers sees this market consisting of people who are SMS addicts, fashion
conscious, love music or are web surfers etc.

However, Apple had the idea to take back the same marketing strategy as it’s
taken out iMac earlier. Indeed the manufacturer offers only a unique range for his
product and thus targets the whole smartphone market by means of the only
iPhone. The iPhone targets the younger population that ranges from 18-35 years of
age who are image-conscious, social, tech-savvy, and educated. Many of these
individuals primarily use their phones to socialize, for school, and for work.
This strategy consisting in ignoring the various possible segments of the market is
thus an undifferentiated strategy.
Apple thus operates, thanks to a marketing of mass, targeted at a very wide
clientele (no geographical or social segmentation) in a market, that of the
Smartphone, nevertheless reserved for the segmentation. This marketing of mass
is rarely used by other companies. However Apple is a rather particular company,
the undifferentiated marketing became its trademark. Apple proposes only a
single product at a time. They thus have a policy which allows them to dim their
production cost by buying massively the same components and also by mass-
producing the same product and not several products.