I.

Iphone Production Network:

Sourcing

Manufacturers at Apple source their materials from all over the world. In an attempt to
offer the very best technology at the lowest possible price, they are willing to scour
the globe. At the same time, they need to partner and work with companies whose
component manufacturers have the capacity to produce on a massive scale.

More than 200 companies around the world manufacture and supply Apple iPhone
manufacturers with the components they need to produce the phones. These
component manufacturers create the memory chips, glass screen interfaces, casings,
cameras, and everything in between. 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. The components go to locations in China, the Czech Republic, Malaysia,
Thailand, and South Korea among others. 

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 deliver individual parts. The
manufacturers specialize in particular items—camera specialists manufacture the lens
and camera assembly, screen specialists build the display, and so on.

Because there are hundreds of individual components in every iPhone, it's not possible
to list every manufacturer whose products are found on the phone. It's also difficult to
discern exactly where those components are made because sometimes one company
builds the same component at multiple factories.

Some of the suppliers of key or interesting parts for the iPhone 5S, 6, and 6S and
where they operate, included:

 Audio chips: Cirrus Logic, based in the U.S. with locations in the U.K., China,
South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and Singapore
 Battery: Samsung, based in South Korea with locations in 80 countries
 Battery: Sunwoda Electronic, based in China
 Camera: Qualcomm, based in the U.S. with locations in Australia, Brazil,
China, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, and more than a dozen locations
through Europe and Latin America
  Camera: Sony, based in Japan with locations in dozens of countries
 Chips for 3G/4G/LTE networking: Qualcomm 
 Glass screen: Corning, based in the U.S., with locations in Australia, Belgium,
Brazil, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India,…
 Flash memory: Toshiba, based in Japan with locations in over 50 countries 
 Flash memory: Samsung 
 LCD screen: Sharp, based in Japan with locations in 13 countries
 LCD screen: LG, based in South Korea with locations in Poland and China
 A-series processor: Samsung 
 A-series processor: TSMC, based in Taiwan with locations in China,
Singapore, and the U.S.
 Touch ID: TSMC
 Touch ID: Xintec. Based in Taiwan. 
 Touch-screen controller: Broadcom, based in the U.S. with locations in Israel,
Greece, the U.K., the Netherlands, Belgium, France, India, China, Taiwan,
Singapore, and South Korea
 Wi-Fi chip: Murata, based in the U.S. with locations in Japan, Mexico, Brazil,
Canada, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, India,
Vietnam, The Netherlands, Spain, the U.K., Germany, Hungary, France, Italy,
and Finland 

Assembly:

The components manufactured by those 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.

Foxconn is Apple's longest-running partner in building these devices. It currently

assembles the majority of Apple's iPhones in its Zhengzhou, China, although Foxconn
maintains factories in countries across the world, including Thailand, Malaysia, the
Czech Republic, South Korea, Singapore, and the Philippines. According to the article
in The New York Times, this factory spreads across 2.2 square miles and employs
approximately 350,000 people. Apple manufacturers in Zhengzhou alone can produce
a whopping 500,000 iPhones per day.

Pegatron is a relatively recent addition to the iPhone assembly process. It is estimated

that it built about 30 percent of the iPhone 6 orders in its Chinese plants.

Delivery

With a global footprint, iPhone manufacturers also look to a global supply chain.
Apple contracts with major carriers including FedEx and UPS to ship iPhones around
the world. One Boeing 747 flight can carry 150,000 iPhones.
For phones bound for the U.S., flights depart from Zhengzhou, China, and head to
Anchorage, Alaska, where the jets can refuel. They then mostly travel to Louisville,
Kentucky, where logistics professionals sort and reroute the iPhones to their final
destinations.

II. Global standardization strategy of Apple ( the case of Iphone ):

A global 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 global standardization strategy and Apple is a typical example

Segmentation

At first we 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 its taken
out Imac dixains? earlier. Indeed the manufacturer offer only a unique range for
his product and thus targets the whole market by means of the only iPhone. 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. Of more the market of
Smartphones is rather recent and Apple was able to benefit from the large-scale
economy of this market (12% of the French people possesses a Smartphone,
which is twice more than in 2008). 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.

But not so long ago, Apple experimented by releasing 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.

Positioning and product policy

1. Apple wants to touch a large number of consumers by proposing a

performing, multifunction, easy to use, ergonomic product and by being
more innovative, to demarcate itself from main competitors, in particular
Samsung and Nokia.

2. IPhone is innovative in the sense: it is the first telephone to propose a

completely tactile wide screen. Apple proposing only a single consumer
telephone, the product is thus multifunction and accessible for everybody
(children, women, men, professionals).

3. Apple then designed the iPhone with an elegant and sober design to affect
the largest number of consumers. The product remains nevertheless a high-
end product, which does not break the quality reputation of Apple.

4. Another good point of Apple's product positioning is that there are very few
variants in each class of products: iPad is available in Black or White, 3G +
Wifi or WiFi only in 3 memory sizes: 16GB, 32GB & 64GB, and 3G is
 available on Verizon or AT&T network. This limits the number of choices the
customer has to choose from and it makes it easy for customer to decide and
buy.

Price policy:

Apple products are generally priced higher than competition. This position has helped
Apple a lot as it avoids getting into price war. Instead of competing on price, Apple
can now compete on innovation and unique value propositions. This position of a
premium priced superior product was once occupied by IBM and later by Sony.
Premium pricing strategy helps to make big profits without hurting the brand. Apple
brand is the most valuable asset, bigger than all the technologies it controls. Having
volumes at this premium pricing helps Apple to make bold design decisions and force
its supply partners to comply with its design decision. To strengthen its premium
pricing, Apple does not do any discounting on its products