How much do you think a Foxconn employee gets paid to put together an iPhone on its vast Chinese assembly lines?
£10 per phone, maybe? Or £7 per hour?
Not even close.
ABC's Nightline programme has recently been given access to one of Foxconn's factories, seeing how Apple puts together its high value smartphones.
Horace Dediu, an analyst and former business development manager for Nokia, has been looking through some of the findings of the report and estimated just how much workers are paid to put together each handset.
- iPhones take 24 hours to be built, meaning workers make around $1.78 (£1.28) an hour
- Human labour costs for each handset will cost Apple/Foxconn around $12.50 (£9) and $30 (£21.60) per unit
- That means human labour accounts for two to five per cent of a handset's final price
- At that rate, more of your money is going on the phone's warranty than paying the humans who built it for you
Foxconn has since stated that it pays 75 per cent of its staff a basic rate of 13.75 Chinese Yuan (£1.50) per hour - which is apparently a competitive rate. Some workers in the assembly line handle as many as 6,000 iPhones a day, in processes which could be carried out by machines, but which would actually cost more than paying a human to do it.
More details will become available once ABC airs its show on 1 March.
[Via: Cnet]
