Apple supplier Goertek says vice-president leaving company just days after he sounded alarm on supply chain exodus from China
- Goertek said Yoshinaga was leaving for ‘personal reasons’, but the move comes after he painted a gloomy picture for China’s manufacturing sector
- Cracks are appearing in the complex supply chain that took Apple decades to build, with suppliers being asked to build factories outside China
Goertek, one of Apple’s largest acoustic products suppliers, said its vice-president Kazuyoshi Yoshinaga is leaving the company, in a surprise move that comes just days after his remarks about Apple suppliers exiting China made headlines.
In a stock exchange filing on Tuesday, Shenzhen-listed Goertek said Yoshinaga was leaving for “personal reasons”, without providing details. The statement did not mention his recent comments about the supply chain, and there is no evidence to show that his resignation was related to the fact that he painted a gloomy picture for the future of the Chinese manufacturing sector.
In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Yoshinaga was quoted as saying that Apple suppliers, including Goertek, have been moving manufacturing capacity out of China faster than observers had anticipated as US-China relations continue to deteriorate, laying bare the fact that China is losing some of its supply chain dominance to India and Vietnam.
Goertek and Yoshinaga did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.
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Yoshinaga submitted his resignation on Tuesday and it came into effect immediately, according to the corporate statement. He does not own any shares of Goertek and will not have any role in affiliated Goertek entities after the resignation, the company added.
China’s stringent Covid-19 restrictions and intensified US-China tech rivalry have rattled Apple’s supply chain over the last three years. Cracks have started to appear in the sophisticated supply chain that took the US tech giant decades to build, as companies from Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group to China’s Goertek and Luxshare Precision Industry Co increase their investments in India and Vietnam, two of the largest beneficiaries of a realignment in the global supply chain.
Last year, efforts by Foxconn’s plant in the central city of Zhengzhou to implement the central government's zero-Covid-19 curbs, while scrambling to churn out Apple’s iPhone 14 orders, backfired, leading to violent clashes and a worker exodus that slowed production at the world’s largest iPhone factory ahead of the holiday shopping season. The incident forced Apple to admit for the first time that its once-reliable Chinese supply chain had failed to deliver.
In the wake of the fiasco, Apple has reportedly been asking its mainland Chinese-based suppliers to speed up plans to set up factories outside China, but neither Apple nor its Chinese suppliers, including Goertek, Luxshare and Foxconn, have publicly acknowledged doing so.
Yoshinaga’s remarks were the first time that a key player in Apple’s Chinese supply chain not only acknowledged the problems, but said the exodus was happening “far faster” than anticipated.
The Chinese government has not made any public comment on Apple asking its suppliers to set up factories elsewhere, but the country has just emerged from three years of strict Covid-19 curbs and Beijing is looking to shore up a slowing economy, vowing to secure its supply chain.
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The 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party held last year acknowledged the adverse impact from the pandemic and geopolitical tensions, but offered slogans such as “Building a resilient supply chain” and “Patch up the weak links in the supply chain” to try and remedy the situation.
According to earlier corporate filings, Yoshinaga, 55, joined the AirPods maker in 2015. He brought experience in “corporate strategy and transformation management”, according to Goertek. His latest annual salary was 1.2 million yuan (US$173,000). Before Goertek, he worked for IBM. Yoshinaga graduated from Tongji University in Shanghai.
