Apple’s IT Outsourcing Strategy

Over the last several years, we have seen plenty of press and analysis on Apple’s use of flexible outsourced manufacturing. Indeed there are estimates out there that as many as 500,000 people are employed in China by manufacturing partners to build iPhones, iPads and more.

What we haven’t seen is very much about how Apple engages in outsourcing arrangements for IT. So we decided to ask the question, does Apple also leverage large scale IT outsourcing? And if so then what kind of IT outsourcing is done by Apple, and how it has been changing with time? With these questions in mind, we started studying Apple’s IT outsourcing and the results surprised us. This report summarizes our findings of Apple’s IT outsourcing initiatives.