On Capital Spending's Transformation of the Electronics Industry - YouTube
by Horace Dediu
Asymco's Horace Dediu on Capital Spending's Transformation of the Electronics Industry - YouTube.
A video of Horace Dediu's presentation at IBM's Electronics Global Leadership Forum in Taipei on 23 October 2012. Horace discusses how Apple's enormous capital spending is reshaping the global supply chain for the industry.
4 comments
seanjohn6969 ·
horace, clearly the latest 10-K says that apple will spend $8 billion this coming fiscal year, slightly lower than last year's projection. What does this tell you? Were you expecting an even further increase?
Ian Ollmann ·
I read $9.15B on p38. What are you subtracting out?
ralphel ·
Good stuff. I thought "I can't possibly spend an hour on this", but I did and it was worth it. If it wasn't a cheese grater, what was it?
Walt French ·
Very interesting presentation.
You addressed market structure in a couple of cases. First, in noting that for Apple to build out a “carrier” network, it would have to sacrifice its other carriers; second in talking about how Apple should consider upstream integration, e.g., buying Intel.
I wonder what would make conditions ripe for an Intel acquisition (or an acquisition of TSMC, for that matter). While the smartphone market has overwhelmed the PC market in shipment numbers, even ARM's just-announced 64 bit processors do not appear to address the needs of servers and even individual workstations.
(Methinks you're just a bit optimistic in your statement that today's smartphones match 4-year-old PCs; this 2-year-old MacBookPro, which does NOT run the fastest Intel chips of 3 years ago, runs 4X — 10X the best scores on ARM-based designs. That matters for some of the work I do and it would matter even more for other needs. The gap has closed but Intel is not standing still nor does the technology permit simple straight-line extrapolation.)
Anyway, Apple buying Intel would directly threaten the PC ecosystem, leading them to shift business to AMD exacerbating the collapse of the X86 value proposition, which would all fall on Apple. I can't see how Apple's Intel Division writing down their X86 IP portfolio would be offset by similar value-added in the ARM food chain, given that the ecosystem of designers nVidia, Qualcomm, Samsung and others combined with fabs at TSMC, Sammy and others is not THAT far behind.
Speaking of collapse of the value proposition, I wonder whether Microsoft has unwittingly marked the value of Windows 8 and Office 13 both at $0, given that it is bundled on hardware that its partners are just able to match in price without the Win8 license. This seems tantamount to a wholesale redefinition of Microsoft's business, one that they cannot be prepared for.