Tim Cook on Chinese manufacturing: "Vocational expertise is very, very deep here" (2018)

There's a confusion about China...  The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor costs.  I'm not sure what part of China they go to, but the truth is, China stopped being a low-labor-cost country many years ago.  The reason [for moving jobs to China] is because of the skill.  The quantity of skill in one location and the type of skill it is.  The products we [make] require really advanced tooling and the precision you have to have in tooling and working with the materials we do are state-of-the-art.  And the tooling skill is very deep here.  In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers, and I'm not sure we could fill the room.  In China, you could fill multiple football fields.  Vocational expertise is very, very deep here.

~ Tim Cook, "Apple CEO Tim Cook explains why Apple chooses China for manufacturing," 2018