A long time ago I was in auto sales. I had a customer who worked at a factory that produced parts for many brands of automobile.
That customer would only buy a Honda car, because they said they observed how absolutely strict Honda was regarding the quality of parts that they would purchase.
Their quality control process for a random part was so meticulous that it gave them faith in the brand as a whole.
I had a similar experience with BAE. The first time I saw they were charging the RAF £5,000 for a torch lightbulb my eyes practically fell out of their sockets - but then, a few years down the road, I found myself working with a QC department there, and their acceptance testing is extraordinary - everything gets the crap beaten out of it, thermal, endurance, vibration, radiation, you name it - and the survivors become aircraft and weapon parts.
Step 1: spin out all your suppliers into their own companies
Step 2: use pricing power to force your suppliers to cut corners in order to survive.
Step 3: claim plausible deniability for the scores of suppliers giving you substandard parts. Roll in your money while telling the rest of the world you couldn’t have done anything differently.
Both us and eu are heavily relying on China. Even Nvidia sells lots of gpus with small limitations to china that in the end will not change things that much. Or ASML sells non covered by sanctions chip production utilities. All this trade war is just scratching the surface, in reality heavy money are made by all parts
This clever geopolitical analysis notably ignores China, and the fact that Trump pushing the EU to China would be the greatest geopolitical victory for China in history.
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