Syracuse iSchool Prof. Jason Dedrick interviewed by NPR's Marketplace on iPhone launch in China
10/28/2009
Jason Dedrick, associate professor at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies (iSchool), was interviewed on the “Marketplace” radio program about the iPhone being released in China on October 30. The program aired on October 28, 2009.
In the interview, Dedrick estimated how much profit apple makes off of a single iPhone compared to how much suppliers and factories, who build the iPhones, benefit.
Apple receives the touchscreen digitizer and the iPhone flash memory chip from Japanese companies, Dedrick said, “the underlying technology and knowledge and innovation is much more concentrated in Japan because you have companies that have been leaders in a lot of these fields for a long time.”
Dedrick estimated that suppliers make 14 percent of the iPhones total profits. Factories in China, that build the iPhone, do not receive big returns on the iPhone.
“China mainly just gets the wages,” Dedrick said. “And that's really not much, that's probably a few dollars per phone.”
Dedrick has a Ph.D. in management from the University of California, Irvine. He also earned a master’s degree in Pacific international affairs at the University of California, San Diego. Dedrick’s research interests focus on the globalization of technology and innovation, a field he has been studying for 20 years, and on the organizational impacts of information technology.
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