專欄製造業

Our fetish for making things fails to understand ‘real work’

You can buy a business suit by George at Asda for £29. It will be practical; ready to wear, polyester blended, machine washable. You can pay 10 times as much at Marks and Spencer for Italian tailoring and good quality wool fabric. And you can pay 10 times as much again for a bespoke suit from Savile Row. You need to decide whether you want a stylish suit, or just a suit; a customised suit, or just a good-looking suit. You need not pay much for a suit but you will pay a lot for style, and a lot more for personalisation.

You – or your government or insurer – will pay a pound or two for a pill and many times that for a specialist drug, such as a modern cancer treatment. Generally, the ingredients will cost a few pence at most. You might pay up to £10m for an aircraft engine, which would fit in a box the size of a small sofa. You are not paying for the materials.

The rear cover of the iPhone tells you it is designed in California and assembled in China. The phone sells, in the absence of carrier subsidy, for about $700. Purchased components – clever pieces of design such as the tiny flash drive and the small but high-performing camera – may account for as much as $200 of this. The largest supplier of parts is Samsung, Apple’s principal rival in the smartphone market. “Assembled in China” costs about $20. The balance represents the return to “designed in California”, which is why Apple is such a profitable company.

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約翰•凱

約翰•凱(John Kay)從1995年開始爲英國《金融時報》撰寫經濟和商業的專欄。他曾經任教於倫敦商學院和牛津大學。目前他在倫敦經濟學院擔任訪問學者。他有著非常輝煌的從商經歷,曾經創辦和壯大了一家諮詢公司,然後將其轉售。約翰•凱著述甚豐,其中包括《企業成功的基礎》(Foundations of Corporate Success, 1993)、《市場的真相》(The Truth about Markets, 2003)和近期的《金融投資指南》(The Long and the Short of It: finance and investment for normally intelligent people who are not in the industry)。

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