IT TAKES 28 YEARS OF SEAFARER MAN-HOURS TO DELIVER YOUR IPHONE
Posted on 27 April 2017 by Nick Chubb
Due to its small size and high price the finished iPhone bucks the trend of most world trade. It is one of the few consumer items that doesn’t arrive at its final destination on a ship, most of the time it travels by plane from Shenzen, where they are manufactured, to wherever they are being sold. What you may not realise though is that during the manufacturing process the constituent parts are carried by ships to all four corners of the world in a 500,000-mile journey.
In Edward Humes’ book – Door to Door, The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation he unpacks the journey of the iPhone 6 from raw materials to the finished product. The unlock button alone goes on a 12,000-mile journey before it is fitted to the finished product. Together, the constituent parts of the iPhone have a footprint of at least 160,000 miles with well over 20 suppliers spread across 3 continents contributing to the phone.
Each of those suppliers, however, has its own set of suppliers spread across the globe. As well as gold, silver, copper, and aluminium, there are eight rare elements in an iPhone all of which have to be mined, refined, and processed to make them useful to the manufacturing process. Tracing the supply chain right back to raw materials places an estimated mileage on the iPhone of 500,000. That’s more than a trip to the moon and back.
There are 50,000 commercial ships crewed by 1.5million seafarers worldwide collectively carrying 90% of world trade. Assuming 90% of the iPhone’s journey to your pocket is on a ship travelling at 24 knots, it takes 781 days to cover the distance required. With a crew of just 13, that’s 243,672 man-hours or 27.8 years.
This is of course just an estimate, based on a whole series of assumptions and estimates. The truth is that the global supply chain is so large and complex that it’s nearly impossible to accurately establish precise numbers. When you begin to consider all of the resources that go in to fuelling the supply chain itself the 28-year figure can rapidly inflate. For example, the journey of bunker fuel alone; from the ground, through to refineries, and eventually onto ships takes thousands of man-hours to complete (including many months of my own time). The further down the rabbit hole you go, the more complex and confusing the system becomes.
24 hours a day 365 days of the year hundreds of thousands of men and women are crewing some of the largest and most technologically advanced pieces of machinery in the world. They often work in harsh or dangerous conditions and are away from loved ones for nine months (sometimes more) at a time.
The iPhone is a spectacularly complex example of global logistics at work, but almost all of the possessions you own, the clothes you wear, and the food you eat has come into contact with a ship at some point before it gets to you. The next time you unbox a new phone, don’t forget to spare a thought for the thousands of hours of human time and effort that went into getting it to you.